But ANIMAL was just an expert system. Today LLM-based chatbots can do the same thing, except for remembering elements of your conversation the next time around,

But ANIMAL was just an expert system. Today LLM-based chatbots can do the same thing, except for remembering elements of your conversation the next time around, or sending email and auto-banning you. And it just costs a few billion dollars, some petabytes of training data and zetaflops of compute to do it, rather than a couple of graduate student-weeks to code it all by hand. There has been so much progress.