Is anyone here aware of LLMs demonstrating an original thought? Something truly novel.

My own impression is something more akin to a natural language search query system. If I want a snippet of code to do X it does that pretty well and keeps me from having to search through poor documentation of many OSS projects. Certainly doesn't produce anything I could not do myself - so far.

Ask it about something that is currently unknown and it list a bunch of hypotheses that people have already proposed.

Ask it to write a story and you get a story similar to one you already know but with your details inserted.

I can see how this may appear to be intelligent but likely isn't.