But does it need to know ahead of time or is it enough to be able to test 10k different directions at once then analyze the results? I have thought the same way in the past, that LLMs can't innovate due to how they are trained, but many of humanity's most important discoveries (fire, antibiotics, microwaves, etc) were discovered accidentally in the pursuit of something else. Even if the AI can't truly invent, all it needs to do is generate and test hypotheses then analyze to see if there is and there there for a human to check out.