On human nature, my experience is that most people do not have much curiosity - those who do are in the minority. But maybe you are right that they would if they had more opportunity to do things.

On LLMs, we are moving beyond LLMs. The LLMs are just one model and one stage of this. Try some of the new reasoning models.

Also, remember that AIs are not software. I explain what they are here: https://medium.com/@cliffberg/why-ai-is-not-software-07a2188e3c13