I suspect that's actually what's going on, LLMs are finding patterns that apply to their question and figure out how to combine them in the correct way. However

I suspect that's actually what's going on, LLMs are finding patterns that apply to their question and figure out how to combine them in the correct way. However, I'd also say this is how vast majority of humans solve math problems. What I've seen from o1/R1 is that they are more capable at this process than the average human, more capable than the vast majority of humans. We can say that they're not "intelligent" because they're not capable of solving problems they can't map to something in their training at all, but that would also put 99.9% of humanity in the unintelligent bucket.