I'm not sure why you'd describe "sampling from a probability distribution over possible tokens" as "minimize surprise in predictions" other than to make it sound similar to the free energy thing.

The free energy thing as I understand it has internal state, makes predictions, evaluates against new input and adjusts it internal state to continuously learn to predict new input better. This might if you squint look similar to training a neural network, although the mechanisms are different, but it's very distinct from the inference step