We kinda move from the situation “LLM can only do what it seen before” to “LLM can do something by composing several things it has seen before”. We didn’t get to the situation “LLM can do things it has not seen before”.

The practicality of the situation is that a lot of problems fall into the second bucket. We all like to think we deal with novel problems, but most of what we can think of was already considered by another human and captured by llm. You had to invent something deliberately unique, and that’s telling. Most startup ideas are invented more than once, for example.

The key shortcoming of the llm is that it is not aware of its own limits. If it ever becomes aware it can outsource such rare things to mechanical Turk.

I routinely use LLMs to do things that have never been done before. It requires carefully structured prompting and context management, but it is quite doable.