Is an AI Model Software? – A Low-Level Technical View

We say "deploy the model" and "ship the model" as if it's software — but is it?

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.