LLMs were very much engineered... the exact results they yield are hard to determine since they're large statistical models, but I don't think that categorizes the LLMs themselves as a 'discovery' (like say Penicilin)
There’s an argument that all maths are discovered instead of invented or engineered. LLM hardware certainly is hard engineering but the numbers you put in it aren’t, once you have them; if you stumbled upon them by chance or they were revealed to you in your sleep it’d work just as well. (‘ollama run mixtral’ is good enough for a dream to me!)
