It seems to me that the long experiment playing out may include simply waiting to see if there is a critical mass threshold to be reached (ie, of this LLM “simply repeating what everyone agrees on” idea) that allows the process to evolve into something closer to “thinking.”
I’m sure I don’t know enough about LLMs, but as others others here are pointing out, this seeming regurgitation of the already-known does seem to provide the foundation or potential for generating hypotheses and/or “new” ideas.