We didn't have the computational power back then, but we envisioned it long beforehand and worked toward a common goal. LLMs are far from useless, and I see the major leap forward they represent, but the relentless dystopian hype is just exhausting
There are approaches on different architectures of AI that lead towards your last point but they are not feasible yet (or maybe ever?). The interpretation part is however also very critical as we have a very own way of perceiving reality and interpreting it.