> ...but the obvious counter-argument is that humans can make creative leaps in abstract fields without such sensory grounding...

But we have no idea at how good humans are at that. Given the appalling failures of humans to handle even basic statistical situations like identifying that the same thing happens over and over, it might be that they are hilariously bad at creative leaps in abstract fields, it is just we have had nothing better available to measure against. We've spent about as long as decision theory existed trying to convince people to use it instead of flailing. Limited success, usually in exceptional cases.

And the paper seems a bit dodgy, we have models created with sensory data available. No reason a LLM can't be trained on more sensory data than a human can accumulate in one lifetime. There is a lot of visual data on YouTube.

Most humans are probably bad at it. Some humans are very good at it. I'd even argue most science does not demand these kinds of leaps and is mostly concerned with incremental improvements, or proving or disproving other people's abductions

The case study they chose is literally Albert Einstein coming up with General Relativity, something most scientists of his time were not able to do