[natch]

You'd have to define LLM and "on its own."

Can the LLM have a runloop? Can the LLM be situated in a world like you and me are?

If the LLM is just a file on a hard disk in a drawer not connected to anything, then obviously it can't discover novel tokens on its own.

If on the other hand the LLM has a runloop and sensors and basic instructions to do observations and run thought experiments and find new combinations of concepts and name them with tokens, then sure, why wouldn't it be able to?

You might say you define LLMs as "LLMs as they exist today in a human prompt-driven system" but that would be an artificial limitation given the trivial level of programming, even simple bash scripting, that would be necessary to give an LLM a runloop, access to sensors, and basic instructions to discover new stuff.