I'm surprised those things used neural networks. With a matrix of answer probabilities (trivially calculated from people's answers), you can choose the question that maximizes your expected information gain.

As I remember it, it was the break out moment for NN that made them mainstream to the masses. Prior to that they were an academic / hacker oddity relegated to works of fictions and just one of the many competing theories towards functioning AI. After 20Q you could buy a handheld NN at walmart. The delay to LLM was such that 20Q made it apparent to the scene that the limiting factor for more practical ai development was purely a scaling problem of complexity limited by compute power. A lot of conversations on /. and the likes centered around when the threshold would be crossed. Most at the time could not have predicted nor accepted that moore’s law would fail putting development back a decade.

To the credit of the naysayers at the time hotmail was still the primary free email service, gmail had yet to come out. Google buying up the darkfiber and had yet to open up their excess compute starting the arms race for the cloud. Most still thought of GPUs only for graphics even though their architecture and intent was there since their inception at thinking machines…