[autokad]

I disagree, it feels like you are just fusing over words and not what's happening in the real world. If you were right, a human doesn't learn anything either, they just memories.

you can look at it by results: I give these models inputs its never seen before but it gives me outputs that are correct / acceptable.

you can look at it in terms of data: we took petabytes of data, and with an 8gb model (stable difusion) we can output an image of anything. That's an unheard of compression, only possible if its generalizing - not memorizing.