I had a professor in grad school say that AI is just a search algorithm. I think that is an interesting way of framing things. Often times the model is just searching its training data for the right output. I don't think this diminishes the value of such models, recent advancements have shown how exciting "just a search algorithm" can be.
I could imagine a philosophy professor with experience in Computer Science arguing that human mind is just a search algorithm - often times the human mind is just searching its training data for the right output (right, in human case, meaning the action that would maximize pleasure and minimize pain, both in long and short term).
Another way of thinking about this may be as a compressed field, where the "prompt" extracts knowledge along a given vector, along the lines of stored inter-token relations, which provide for the internal vectorization, thus reducing redundancy and enabling the compression in the first place.
