It's essentially the same thing. A word is a label on a category. I'd also argue that what neural networks do is not the same thing as humans inferring catego

It's essentially the same thing. A word is a label on a category. I'd also argue that what neural networks do is not the same thing as humans inferring categories from instances. 1. We prefeed the NNs with categories and examples. The main work is already done by the human. 2. What the NN learns from cat pictures is not 'cat', but a bunch of trivial visual features that happen to correlate with a bunch of cat pictures in a very brittle manner. Not at all like what happens when humans learn 'cat' from a few instances, and then can recognize cats everywhere in a huge variety of settings and transformations (as I'm learning with my toddler).