Inference time scaling actually makes a lot of sense at the end of the day. It does feel like Reinforcement Learning (RL) like, child psychology, or just how children learn about the world at times

Reward based learning (I'll give you a treat if you do this right), reward shaping (I'll give you a treat if you do this the way I say it and get it right) exploration vs exploitation, learning through trial and error, imitation learning (here's how to do things because I'm an expert), world models (a mental map of how the world works) 

A great example of transfer learning that I'm reminded of (that book Range? I think its from that I read many years ago) is Roger Federer not even doing Tennis until a later age. He picked up a bunch of different sports, and essentially the transfer learning that happened - feels similar to RL agents taking knowledge from one place and applying it in another without fully losing it

Yeah, that’s a solid take! It’s like kids are RL agents without the code. Do you think AI could ever mimic that level of flexible learning?