@sandorspruit @samth
Think about steam engines.

People like Newcomen and Watt performed observations, had intuitions, and did experiments, and make significant progress. They made tremendously useful engines, even if the science was poor and the engines well short of optimal.

It took ~50 years before before Carnot explained the idealized thermodynamic model, and people could improve the engines from first principles.

We can think of current GenAI systems as being Watt engines.