> It clearly has very finite bounds by the fact we haven’t achieved agi by running an llm in a loop..

That's one hell of a criterion. Test-time inference undergoes a similar scaling law to pretraining, and has resulted in dramatically improved performance on many complex tasks. Law of diminishing returns kicks in of course, but this doesn't mean it's ineffective.

> akin to taking a few more stabs at RNG

Assuming I understand you correctly, I disagree. Scaling laws cannot appear with glassy optimisation procedures (essentially iid trials until you succeed, the mental model you seem to be implying here). They only appear if the underlying optimisation is globally connected and roughly convex. It's no different than gradient descent in this regard.