Question for those who believe LLMs aren't intelligent and are merely statistical word predictors: how do you reconcile such achievements with that point of view?

(To be clear: I'm not agreeing or disagreeing. I sometimes feel the same too. I'm just curious how others reconcile these.)

It doesn't matter if you use a car or go there walking. If your goal is cave exploration, the tools are irrelevant.

Those things aren't mutually exclusive. They are demonstrably statistical token predictors (go examine an open source implementation) and they clearly exhibit intelligence.