> Can it, or will it, ever be capable of true creativity, thinking out of the box, strokes of genius, eureka moments

Flatly no, certainly not the "Large language model" that has captured everyone's attention.

In fact, it is easy to see how bad LLM AIs really are, just ask it a very narrow-focus question about a subject within your own area of expertise!
 
Example - Chat GPT vs little Jimmy, ASE-Certified quantum mechanic:

Q: "How can I use angular momentum operators, particularly the raising/creation and lowering of annihilation operators to treat other Lie Groups?"

It spews some stuff plagiarized from a textbook about angular momentum operators, and then hand-waves the actual question away with:

"In summary, the techniques involving angular momentum operators and their raising and lowering operators can be extended to treat other Lie groups by identifying the generators of the group and their commutation relations, and then defining appropriate operators based on them to manipulate the states of the system."

Which did nothing but rephrase the specific question I asked into a declarative statement!  I asked **HOW**, and it simply defined the significant parts of the system!  It hand-waved away the "how" with the phrase "defining appropriate operators".  Well, duh - that's the crux of what I asked about!

Now, to someone who has no area of expertise, the answer looks and sounds impressive, but LLM are, by definition, bvll5h1t artists - they are the guy who read the manual, but has never used the tool.  The guy who memorized the brochure, but has no idea how to even start the BobCat.

We've all run into this type of poser.  Many of us have very quickly removed them from whatever mission-critical task they talked their way into, as they were a danger to themselves and others, and a hazard to navigation.  

In summary, Sarah Connor can sleep soundly for the foreseeable short-term future.

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