[mindcrime]

> was there any improvement of ELIZA type chatbots, before the advent of LLMs

There were. If you're really interested in that history, one place to look is at the historical record of the Loebner Prize[1] competition. The Loebner was a competition based on a "Turing Test" like setup and was held annually up until 2019 or so. I think they quit holding it once LLM's came along, probably because they felt like LLM's sort of obviated the need for it or something.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loebner_Prize

[jonbaer]

Well back then you had to be (think) original in fooling a human, and many bots made sure NOT to include copyright material. Also many of them were run locally (and in memory), so they ran faster and without the need for GPU memory (not to mention GPUs/CUDA were not readily available - or available at all - either).