Certainly random chance exists for discovery. But most revolutionary type discoveries come from deep understanding of the context.

The contribution of LLMs to knowledge is more like that of search engines. It is still the human which possesses understanding that ultimately will be the principle source of innovation. The LLM can assist with navigating and exploring existing information.

However, LLMs have significant downsides in this regard too. The hallucination problem is no joke. It can often mislead you and cause a loss of time on some tasks.

Overall, they will be somewhat useful in some manner, but substantially less so than the present hype machine suggests.