Robin Boothroyd

Oxford researchers just published a paper arguing LLMs cannot invent anything. Mathematically impossible. The reason is simple and brutal. A model trained to predict the next word can never believe something the existing data says is wrong. And every real breakthrough in history started with exactly that belief. In 1903 every prediction machine on Earth would have told the Wright Brothers that human flight was one to ten million years away. Nine weeks later they flew. Not because they had better data. Because they had a theory the data hadn't caught up to yet. That is the gap between AI and human thinking. LLMs mirror the past. Humans reason into a future that doesn't exist yet. Oxford just proved mathematically that those are two different things. I use these models every day. This matches what I see. The new stuff always comes from the human at the keyboard who decides the data is wrong. LLMs don't think. You do.