Comment by nnechm

Yes, they are definitely not primitive, but considering how the breakthrough in LLMs happened, i.e MSFT, GOOGL were working on it, even as late as 2021, Google's BERT was not really there (at least the one they showed the public in the blog from Google research). So the sudden jump from ok to great thanks to openAI would probably mean a lot of existing systems also need to do that.