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The AI most certainly does not lack the ability to generalize. Not as well as humans, but generalization is the key interesting result in deep learning, leading to papers like this one: https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.05468

The ability to generalize actually seems to keep increasing with the number of parameters, which is the key interesting result in the GPT-* line of work that Copilot is based on.

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I've seen some very clever output from GPT-*, but zero indicating any kind of abstract generalized understanding of any topic in use.

Being able to predict the most likely succeeding string for a given input can be extremely useful. I've even used it with some success as a more sophisticated kind of search engine for some materials science questions.

But I'm under no illusions that it has the first shadow of a hint of minor understanding of the topics of materials science, nevermind any general understanding.

It seems we're discussing different meanings of the word "generalize".

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