[ben_w]

I think it's more that the old expert systems (AKA flow charts) did work, but required you to already be an expert to answer every decision point.

Modern LLMs solve the huge problem of turning natural language from non-experts into the kind of question an expert system can use… 95% of the time.

95% is fantastic if you're e.g. me with GCSE grade C in biology from 25 years ago, asking a medical question. If you're already a domain expert, it sucks.

I suspect that feeding the output of an LLM into an expert system is still useful, for much the same reason that feeding code from an LLM into a compiler is useful.