Or it HAS made some such discoveries and HAS made such recommendations, but they are so wildly Politically Incorrect that they "must be kept secret" from us.

Despite the neural network architecture, LLMs don't operate like the human brain. They're just fancy curve fitting algorithms. They need to reason and understand things to help us discover new things. But how do you program understanding? How do human brains even understand?

I don't think I would make any new connections either if my brain state reset after each token. We don't let LLMs be bored and wonder about things while. They spit out tokens in response to a question and then halt.

the more someone understands AI/ML, the more they realise how far we're away from human level AGI - or - someone is shilling their product/trying to gain clout if they are saying otherwise.

That may be because the new philosophy of mind abandoned old traditional concepts from Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. You don't simply discard something they said without a damn good reason in philosophy... These are the GOATs. To them, what made the human mind fundamentally different from an animal...