Similarly to books, the large language models communicate information that comes from somewhere, from people. They use math (such as statistics, though I'd argue that's an oversimplification of ML applications) and computer programming to do this just like a book uses words and ink. Debating whether or not weights reflecting some word statistics can "contain intelligence" is similar to debating whether or not the pages of the book "contain knowledge".
Personally that strikes me as a kind of literalistic perspective. Articles like the one posted here remind us where the "intelligence" _really_ comes from, which as you say probably isn't the word statistics themselves, though maybe you'd accept that LLMs can "encode intelligences" just as books can "encode knowledge". Encodings are meaningless without a little decoding! Decoding is a process of meaning making, almost by definition.
A more interesting question along the same lines of the one of whether or not LLMs can "be intelligent" or "contain intelligence": Can LLMs be embodied by some being or beings? Personally I think the answer is very clearly yes, but in a super basic way that a lot of people would dismiss as dull... we embody them when we interact with them or build them, when they cause palpable effects to us, near or far, direct or indirect. That's the life force that lives "inside" of technology. It's the same life force that lives in us. Except it leaks everywhere, it's not contained. It flows through through inter-relation and interaction.
Are there "other" non-human beings that embody LLMs? Or books for that matter? At the very least the aggregate industrial forces that produced them would be good candidates for having some kind of beingness, and also for embodying these tools. So that's where to look if you want to find some "other" intelligence. These tools are quickly becoming vital parts of very large more-than-one-human organisms.
I'd argue that precisely the converse is true: A book contains intelligence (as do all things), but it cannot actively communicate it.
Maybe the intelligence/knowledge debate needs to be had, where:
1. intelligence implies the autonomy to act on knowledge
2. knowledge is the derivative of intelligent action
So you could argue ChatGPT is AGK: artificially generally knowledgeable. And then of course we can restrict books to being "knowledgeable" entities rather than overloading the term "intelligence".