I mean, indeed most "novel ideas" are about making novel connections between existing concepts, and more rarely about creating novel concepts. However, bunching together concepts, even if in a novel way, does not necessarily constitute "novel idea" as the connections have to be in some ways meaningful and interesting, in a certain context. In the previous case, which is actually quite typical of LLMs, a "novel idea" was produced by bunching together certain terms, in a way that it looks syntactically correct and even conceptually solid in a superficial manner. But from a scientific point of view, it is non-sensical and, basically, junk. Bunching together concepts as words does not make a scientific idea or theory. This is a complex process in science, that involves different scales of argumentation, none of which is provided by LLMs. But this is as far as merely manipulating language can get one.