I can’t help but notice how much this echoes Francois Chollet’s On the Measure of Intelligence: https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.01547 Most of frontier-model progress still looks like skill acquisition optimization: broader benchmark coverage and performance, more domains absorbed into the training distribution, and increasingly strong performance within that surface area. It seems more about coverage-driven competence. So…
You are conflating multiple things. 1) First, you are talking about positive forward transfer in continual learning. I've been giving talks for the past 6-7 years about how that community (I was one of the founders) went astray and wasn't focusing enough on that topic, but continual learning of the kind you are thinking isn't in any of these systems right now. I think some people left the Grok team to make a start-up…
Further, if there is a correlation, I'd bet it's not so much an intrinsic "creativity" trait, but more effectively higher creativity because more trials. That is, along the lines of Chollet's paper, a measure of creativity should be based on a fixed budget with fixed knowledge.
Among many other possibilities I haven't considered, perhaps another mechanism could be that because ADHD people spend more time thinking in less goal-oriented ways and mixing thoughts on accident, perhaps we do in fact gain some learned creativity via experience with vagueness[1]? But that might also imply that part of creativity is actually being able to diffuse more freely through thought space and lowering the barrier to attempted connections between ideas. That lower barrier leads to less likelihood of any "collision" being meaningful but maybe it's overcome by higher collision rates? Or maybe effectively higher order (not just pairwise) collisions?
Disclaimer in case it's not obvious: I don't know any of the literature on what creativity even means or how it's quantified.
[1] Which is me injecting an assumption that creativity ~= connecting things with no obvious or well-troden reasoning path between them.
edit -- oops just looked at your profile after seeing someone elses comment. I assume you are stating a fact then, leaving original anyway