Nah, in the '70s they expected us to have stuff way better than LLMs by now.

I remember reading in the 80's, can't remember where (this 60's Time-Life book series, maybe? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_Science_Library), where they were discussing the latest advances in training neural nets, and the idea that with a big enough net they could simulate the human brain. Maybe those Time books are on archive.org, I'll have to look for them sometime.

On Wikipedia it seems that research dates back to the 40's, but work was definitely in progress in the 50's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_network_(machine_learning)

So for us old farts, LLMs (even though it's different technology obviously) seem more like "finally" because since Eliza we've been hearing and dreaming about it for ages. Too bad that the reality of them is so dark! And every movie and show tried to warn us: 2001 A Space Odyssey, The Ultimate Computer (Star Trek TOS), TRON, Terminator 2... but we thought "nah, that's just the movies".