I have no idea how Magnus Carlsen "understands" chess. Neither does anyone else. His brain is giant neural net, taking inputs, sending signals around, and coming out with an output. We think we understand the mechanics of this, but we do not understand exactly why or how sending these signals around produces such good outputs.
So to argue you know for certain that an LLM is not intelligent because it is "just" a next token predictor, without knowing if that is how the human brain operates, is thinking too highly of yourself.