[pmontra]

It's an analogy that's only partially good.

Software from 50 or 30 years ago couldn't solve some of the problems current software is solving because the hardware wasn't powerful enough. Example: we had neural networks theory and a little practice but without the current hardware we could not work on them and advance the theory. Could we be confident that LLM could be as good as they are? We could not.

However let's go back 20 years or maybe 30 and more mundane tasks like word processing and spreadsheet were already a solved. We needed only to port them to newer versions of the OS. A Word from around 2000 would be OK for most tasks today.