The 1905 thought experiment actually cuts both ways. Did humans "invent" the airplane? We watched birds fly for thousands of years — that's training data. The Wright brothers didn't conjure flight from pure reasoning, they synthesized patterns from nature, prior failed attempts, and physics they'd absorbed. Show me any human invention and I'll show you the training data behind it.

Take the wheel. Even that wasn't invented from nothing — rolling logs, round stones, the shape of the sun. The "invention" was recognizing a pattern already present in the physical world and abstracting it. Still training data, just physical and sensory rather than textual.

And that's actually the most honest critique of current LLMs — not that they're architecturally incapable, but that they're missing a data modality. Humans have embodied training data. You don't just read about gravity, you've felt it your whole life. You don't just know fire is hot, you've been near one. That physical grounding gives human cognition a richness that pure text can't fully capture — yet.

Einstein is the same story. He stood on Faraday, Maxwell, Lorentz, and Riemann. General Relativity was an extraordinary synthesis — not a creation from void. If that's the bar for "real" intelligence, most humans don't clear it either. The uncomfortable truth is that human cognition and LLMs aren't categorically different. Everything you've ever "thought" comes from what you've seen, heard, and experienced. That's training data. The brain is a pattern-recognition and synthesis machine, and the attention mechanism in transformers is arguably our best computational model of how associative reasoning actually works.

So the question isn't whether LLMs can invent from nothing — nothing does that, not even us.

Are there still gaps? Sure. Data quality, training methods, physical grounding — these are real problems. But they're engineering problems, not fundamental walls. And we're already moving in that direction — robots learning from physical interaction, multimodal models connecting vision and language, reinforcement learning from real-world feedback. The brain didn't get smart because it has some magic ingredient. It got smart because it had millions of years of rich, embodied, high-stakes training data. We're just earlier in that journey with AI. The foundation is already there — AGI isn't a question of if anymore, it's a question of execution.

Nice ChatGPT answer. Put some real thought and data in it too.

> Einstein is the same story. He stood on Faraday, Maxwell, Lorentz, and Riemann.

Yes, which is available to the model as data prior to 1905.