There will always be a %age of humans who will be curious how the universe works including LLMs. Delusional to think those humans are only incentivized by degrees, or money.

Humans were curious and started the intelligence / learning explosion much much before money and degrees were invented.

For most of history we died of easily preventable diseases because we lacked the scientific institutions to learn how to prevent them. The fact that a percentage of the population wanted to know more is why we live so well today, but it didn’t stop many of those people from dying awfully. It wouldn’t take a lot to go back there, or at least to a civilization that would go back there the second the AIs have a major outage.

Sure. But unless they are born into a very wealthy family, or decide to pass up on having a family and other hobbies, they won't be able to satisfy that curiosity beyond a very basic level.