I see phrases like "thinking" and "intellgence". I'm not up on the latest in AI but aren't LLMs still just doing a sort of predictive "word math" to come up wi

I see phrases like "thinking" and "intellgence". I'm not up on the latest in AI but aren't LLMs still just doing a sort of predictive "word math" to come up with a string of words as an answer? The phrases here imply (to me at least) that there is more going on than that... is there?