Intelligence is almost certainly a fundamentally recursive process.

The ability to think about your own thinking over and over as deeply as needed is where all the magic happens. Counterfactual reasoning occurs every time you pop a mental stack frame. By augmenting our stack with external tools (paper, computers, etc.), we can extend this process as far as it needs to go.

LLMs start to look a lot more capable when you put them into recursive loops with feedback from the environment. A trillion tokens worth of "what if..." can be expended without touching a single token in the caller's context. This can happen at every level as many times as needed if we're using proper recursive machinery. The theoretical scaling around this is extremely favorable.