> One of the biggest pons asinorums that people get hung up on is the idea that "it just imitates the data, therefore, it can never be better than the average datapoint (or at least, best datapoint); how could it possibly be better?"

Hmm - the phrasing that perhaps holds more water is that LLMs just imitate the data, which means that novel ideas / code tends to be smashed against the force of averaging when fed into an LLM. E.g. NotebookLM summaries/podcasts are good infotainment but they tend to flatten unconventional paragraphs into platitudes or common wisdom. Obviously this is very subjective and hard to benchmark.