[danielbln]

Generally us humans come up with new things by remixing old ideas. Where else would they come from? We are synthesizing priors into something novel. If you break the problem space apart enough, I don't see why some LLM can't do the same.

[tovej]

LLM's cannot synthesize text, they can only concatenate or mix statistically. Synthesis requires logical reasoning. That's not how LLMs work.

[danielbln]

Yes it is, LLMs perform logical multi step reasoning all the time, see math proofs, coding etc. And whether you call it synthesis or statistical mixing is just semantics. Do LLMs truly understand? Who knows, probably not, but they do more than you make it out to be.