He doesn't say "that LLMs based on transformers can't create anything truly novel". Maybe he thinks that, maybe not, but what he says is that "today's systems" can't do that. He doesn't make any general statement about what transformer-based LLMs can or can't do; he's saying: we've interacted with these specific systems we have right now and they aren't creating genuinely novel things. That's a very different claim, with very different implications.

Again, for all I know maybe he does believe that transformer-based LLMs as such can't be truly creative. Maybe it's true, whether he believes it or not. But that interview doesn't say it.