Using your analogy, it's absolutely unknowable to bacteria, and therefore absolutely unknowable to us. Random is perhaps the most intellectually honest way of describing it, since it is widely accepted that randomness is a feature of relatively uncomplicated systems.
What is called as 'Random', I will term it as 'free will'. In case of a human training an AI, free will be of the human and in case of creation of universe free will be that of the 'intelligent designer'
at least for human it is definitely not 'free will' as it is influenced by everything that has happened to it before and would not have made the same choices, if it had been influenced by other things in another way.