Is an AI Model Software? – A Low-Level Technical View(bensantora-com.pages.dev)
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Is an AI Model Software? – A Low-Level Technical View
https://bensantora-com.pages.dev/posts/is-an-ai-model-software/
https://bensantora-com.pages.dev/posts/is-an-ai-model-software/
A .gguf or .safetensors file has no control flow, no executable instructions — it's inert without an inference engine. That makes it data, not code. Yet weights implicitly encode behavior the same way conditionals do, just in a non-linear way.
I feel the answer is "no" but I'm not sure that's the complete answer. I'm curious what others think.