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I suspect even some of the more "advanced" queries they demoed off, i.e., "what was that restaurant John and I talked about last week?" also not require LLMs whatsoever and could have been accomplished with a simple search.

I think you're going to need some kind of ML to turn that question into a structured search, and interpret the results.

Not necessarily. NLP is possible to do without any ML. See ELIZA [0] as an example, which used pattern matching and substitution to process natural language. A few simple rules can cover a majority of requests. It's still AI, but not ML.

Though I do agree that the ML-based NLP thst we have today is much more usable, albeit more compute-expensive.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA

This matches my use cases. Poor speech to text recognition so I don't trust siri to do anything non-trivial

Siri was always AI, but the popular connotation of "AI" changes all the time. It now means "LLMs built with transformers."