The major AIs have access to all sorts of tools, including a math library. I thought this was well-known. There's no "illusion of actual insight" - they're just "using a calculator" (in the sense that they call a math library when needed). AIs are not just LLMs.

You can train a LLM on just multiplication and test it on ones it has never seen before, it's nothing particularly magical.

It's not 'magic' though but previously LLMs have performed very badly on longer multiplication, 'insight' is the wrong word but I'm saying maybe they're not wildly better at this calculation... maybe they are just optimising these well known jagged edges.