[mckirk]

I'd argue that just because LLMs only reproduce patterns they have seen, this does not mean they are incapable of invention. It is possible that, if they manage to replicate the data at a deep enough level, that they start to replicate the underlying reasoning process itself, which means they could definitely be capable of putting together different parts of a puzzle to come up with something you could call an 'invention' that was not in their training data.