It also isn’t really clear to me that humans aren’t also interpolating between complex existing concepts when we come up with novel thoughts or ideas. Our minds are complex, our pre-existing knowledge base is complex. It’s impossible to know if our unique thoughts aren’t really some complex amalgamation of other thoughts we already have in there somewhere, perhaps a mashup of seemingly unrelated thoughts that just happen to lie closely in the multidimensional space of ideas to the thing we are thinking about. Sounds potentially similar to a complex LLM then, really.
Interpolating sounds like a simple task.
But whether it is depends entirely on the data. Simple data will result in a simple interpolating model.
But complex data requires complex relationships to be learned.
Calling a complex model just an interpolator is like saying human beings are just another bag of atoms doing what atoms do. Technically correct, but missing the significance of humans.