Whether you draw the system boundary of an LLM to include the tools it calls or not is a rather arbitrary distinction, and not very interesting.
Goalposts are moving though. Through the efforts of various people in the rationalist-connected space, the word has since morphed to be implicitly synonymous with the notion of superintellgence and self-improvement, hence the vague and conflicting definitions people now ascribe to it.
Also, fwiw the training process behind the generation of an LLM is absolutely able to discover new and novel ideas, in the same sense that Kepler’s laws of planetary motion were new and novel if all you had were Tycho Brache’s astronomical observations. Inference can tease out these novel discoveries, if nothing else. But I suspect also that your definition of creative and novel would also exclude human creativity if it were rigorously applied—our brains after all are merely remixing our own experiences too.
This isn't being pedantic, it's deliberately misinterpreting a commonly used term by taking every word literally for effect. Terms, like words, can take on a meaning that is distinct from looking at each constituent part and coming up with your interpretation of a literal definition based on those parts.
https://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/generality.pdf
Or look at the old / early AGI conference series:
Or read any old, pre-2009 (ImageNet) AI textbook. It will talk about "narrow intelligence" vs "general intelligence," a dichotomy that exists more in GOFAI than the deep learning approaches.
Maybe I'm a curmudgeon and this is entering get-off-my-lawn territory, but I find it immensely annoying when existing clear terminology (AGI vs ASI, strong vs weak, narrow vs. general) is superseded by a confused mix of popular meanings that lack any clear definition.
I looked at the AGI conference page for 2009: https://agi-conference.org/2009/
When it uses the term "artificial general intelligence", it hyperlinks to this page: http://www.agiri.org/wiki/index.php?title=Artificial_General...
Which seems unavailable, so here is an archive from 2007: https://web.archive.org/web/20070106033535/http://www.agiri....
And that page says "In Nov. 1997, the term Artificial General Intelligence was first coined by Mark Avrum Gubrud in the abstract for his paper Nanotechnology and International Security". And here is that paper: https://web.archive.org/web/20070205153112/http://www.foresi...
That paper says: "By advanced artificial general intelligence, I mean AI systems that rival or surpass the human brain in complexity and speed, that can acquire, manipulate and reason with general knowledge, and that are usable in essentially any phase of industrial or military operations where a human intelligence would otherwise be needed."
I think that your insisting that AGI means something different than what everyone else means when they say it is not useful, and will only lead to people getting confused and disagreeing with you. I agree that it's not a great term.