>programs that would basically solve NLP

There is a load-bearing “basically” in this statement about the chat bots that just told me that the number of dogs granted forklift certification in 2023 is 8,472.

Sure, maybe solving NLP is too great a claim to make. It is still not at all ordinary that beforehand we could not solve referential questions algorithmically, that we could not extract information from plain text into custom schemas of structured data, and context-aware mechanical translation was really unheard of. Nowadays LLMs can do most of these tasks better than most humans in most scenarios. Many NLP questions at least I find interesting reduce to questions of the explanability of LLMs.