I mean, it's absolutely software.

Software is used to make models, but the models aren’t software anymore than Toy Story is software.

Forgive my ignorance, I haven't studied the AI tooling landscape yet. Are you saying these models have a structured binary format and "running" them is just a matter of having a "player" with the right "codec"?

Or are they directly executing CPU instructions?

They are basically a series of intermediate bytecodes to be compiled to the hardware they actually run on, in addition to the large tables of weights that bytecode references.

Just a few billion of them that no person created or understands, which are based on the their input data and not design decisions, which include random initialization. I see no reason to treat them any differently than software in a conversation about OSS.

Model inputs are definitely design decisions, what data to use, how to fine tune them, what methods were used in weighting things. This is LITERALLY the source of the model. The model is a binary like an EXE

There's literally a list of opcodes to be executed in the model. There's a whole lot of data too, but that's part of the build just as much as anything in a .data section.

Toy Story is also software. It's a program you run on a renderer to generate a/v.