[GreedClarifies]

"It’s not rocket science or some evil magic"

It sure is.

If you had told people in 2019 that a computer program could summarize large topics and write cogent output you would have been placed in the asylum.

[michaelt]

There's been an "AutoSummarise" tool in Microsoft Word since 2003 [1]

Whats different these days is people might actually trust the tool enough to use it :)

[1] https://www.officetooltips.com/word_2003/tips/getting_to_the...

[rvnx]

In 2013 it was already done by kids: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/yahoo-acquires-summly-app-150...

[probably_wrong]

Sorry, but that's incorrect.

Leaving aside the mind-blowingly large amount of research on summarization that existed in 2019, I'll say this: by then the task was so we'll understood that there were multiple tldr bots on Reddit.