I come back to something like this idea when I consider the distinction being made that LLMs can only combine and interpolate between points in their training material. I could write a brute-force program that just used an English dictionary to produce every possible one-billion-gazillion word permutation of the words within, with no respect for rules of language, and chances are there would be some provable, testable, novel insight somewhere in the results if you had the time to sift through and validate all of it. LLMs seem like a tool that can search that space more effectively than any we've had before.