This is exactly how problem solving works, regardless of the substrate of cognition.

Start with "all your questions contained in randomness" -> the unconstrained solution space.

The game is whether or not you can inject enough constraints to collapse the solution space to one that can be solved before your TTL expires. In software, that's generally handled by writing efficient algorithms. With LLMs, apparently the SOTA for this is just "more data centers, 6 months, keep pulling the handle until the right tokens fall out".

Intelligence is just knowing which constraints to apply and in what order such that the search space is effectively partitioned, same thing the "reasoning" traces do. Same thing thermostats, bacteria, sorting algorithms and rivers do, given enough timescale. You can do the same thing with effective prompting.

The LLM has no grounding, no experience and no context other than which is provided to it. You either need to build that or be that in order for the LLM to work effectively. Yes, the answers for all your questions are contained. No, it's not randomness. It's probability and that can be navigated if you know how

You can constrain the solution space all you want, but if you don't have a method to come up with possible solutions that might match the constraints, you ll be just sitting there all day long for the machine to produce some results. So intelligence is not "just knowing which constraints to apply". It is also the ability to come up with solutions within the constraints without going through a lot of trial and error...

But hey, if LLMs can go through a lot of trial and error, it might produce useful results, but that is not intelligence. It is just a highly constrained random solution generator..