Well put. You ask LLMs about ARC-like challenges and they are able to come up with a list of possible problem formulations even before you show them the input. The models already know that they might expect various object manipulations, symmetry problem, etc. The fact that the solution costs thousands of dollars says to me that the model iterates over many solutions while using this implicit knowledge and feedback it gets from running the program. It is still impressive, but I don't think this is what the ARC prize was supposed to be about.