While I don't think anyone has a plausible theory that goes to this level of detail on how humans actually think, there's still a major difference. I think it's fair to say that if we are doing a brute force search, we are still astonishingly more energy efficient at it than these LLMs. The amount of energy that goes into running an LLM for 12h straight is vastly higher than what it takes for humans to think about similar problems.
In the research group I am, we have usually try a few approach to each problem, let's say we get a:
Method A) 30% speed reduction and 80% precision decrease
Method B) 50% speed reduction and 5% precision increase
Method C) 740% speed reduction and 1% precision increase
and we only publish B. It's not brute force[1], but throw noodles at the wall, see what sticks, like the GP said. We don't throw spoons[1], but everything that looks like a noodle has a high chance of been thrown. It's a mix of experience[1] and not enough time to try everything.
