Depends on what you mean with "new knowledge". A lot of inventions are "just" novel combinations of things we already knew.

Finetuning is not useful for teaching new facts, the current solution for that is using RAG: https://zzbbyy.substack.com/p/why-you-need-rag-not-finetunin...

The value of research isn’t just in the ideas. It’s in the grounding of ideas in fact. It might be able to suggest interesting experiments, but those experiments still need to be carried out.