Perhaps you could provide an example of a hard problem that was solved that wasn't done so through breaking a problem down into small pieces. No academic paper

Perhaps you could provide an example of a hard problem that was solved that wasn't done so through breaking a problem down into small pieces. No academic paper ever written, invention ever created or piece of art I can think of or heard of (including general relativity, which was referenced earlier in thread), was solved by just sitting there and thinking about the big hard problem and solving the big hard problem in one go. The closest I can think of what you're referring to is an accidental discovery, so I think that's where our lines are crossed. At its core I still don't buy that LLMs are useless in the context of solving hard problems. You disagree. Time and experience will tell, but it seems more likely that successes will be attributed to them than not.