I'd say that difference between nature boiling down to maths and LLMs boiling down to maths is that in LLMs it's not the knowledge itself that is abstracted, it's language. This makes it both more believable to us humans, because we're wired to use language, and less suitable to actually achieve something, because it's just language all the way down.
Would be nice if it gets us something in the long run, but I wouldn't keep my hopes up