This is a good take on the situation. LLMs are able to achieve the 1000 monkey problem by throwing inexhaustible amounts of resources at the problem. But novel solutions to problems seem to be scarce. There are many things in the world that can be done using complex processes but the ones that survive are those that are easy to understand and replicate. A good example of this is the production of carbon nano tubes or solid state batteries. Neither have an easy to understand and scalable solution yet. Both seem like “make the world a better place” technologies that are not coming from any frontier lab.