# Top mathematicians say LLMs are strong calculators but poor creative thinkers > Source: > Published: 2026-08-16 15:31:21+00:00 # Top mathematicians say LLMs are strong calculators but poor creative thinkers **LLMs can't jump, Part II.** Mathematicians Timothy Gowers and Peter Sarnak credit large language models with serious math skills but see hard limits for genuinely new ideas. [Gowers argues](https://gowers.wordpress.com/2026/08/12/what-sort-of-maths-are-llms-good-at/) current models are good at combining known methods and trying many search paths but lack the intuition to pick the few productive routes in a vast search space. [Sarnak agrees](https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/202607/noti3373/noti3373.html): AI can derive results from existing theory but fails to develop the abstractions that underpin major proofs when starting from an elementary question. DeepMind researcher Tom Zahavy reached a similar conclusion. In his [paper "LLMs Can't Jump,"](https://the-decoder.com/language-models-cant-spark-scientific-revolutions-but-world-models-might/) he pins the bottleneck on "manipulative abduction," the ability to invent new foundational assumptions with no linguistic precedent. World models could offer a way forward. These assessments feed into a broader debate about [whether LLMs are actually becoming more versatile](https://the-decoder.com/ex-openai-researcher-bets-100-billion-will-flow-into-training-data-because-scaling-alone-wont-cut-it/) or "just" getting better at benchmarks and familiar problem spaces. ``` AI News Without the Hype – Curated by Humans Subscribe to THE DECODER for ad-free reading, a weekly AI newsletter, our exclusive "AI Radar" frontier report six times a year, full archive access, and access to our comment section. Subscribe now ```