| Just a bunch of numbers and weights

I agree with your sentiment, but it’s not just that the data is encoded as a model, but it’s extremely lossy. Compression, encoding, digital photography, etc is just turning pictures into different numbers to be processed by some math machine. It’s the fact that a huge amount of information is actually lost during training, intentionally, that makes a huge difference. If it was just compression, it would be a gaming changing piece of tech for other reasons. YouTube would be using it today, but it is not good at keeping the original data from the training.

Rant not really for you, but in case someone else nitpicks in the future :)