Today maybe. I disagree in the long term.

While they’ll never have the same subjective experience as humans, what stops an LLM from applying similar lines of thought* in a manner that results in a novel conjecture?

They are prediction machines, and so are we in a way. We can give them nearly limitless resources to scale their predictive capabilities. We have billions of years of training baked in. They distill directly from our knowledge and can walk down paths that no human has before.

It’s silly to say they’ll never do anything novel.

At their current capabilities, it sounds like they are already capable of being a specific type is research assistant. What will that look like in 10-20 years?

Famously, all of maths is axioms and tautologies, so I'm not sure this will assuage any professional mathematicians currently having an existential crisis.

Maths was already infinite, it's still infinite, but who wants to spend all their lives changing rooms inside Hilbert's Hotel?