alt Hacker NewsThe idea of talking to a machine that has all of humanities knowledge and gives answers is older than electronic computing. It certainly wasn't a novel idea when Jobs gave that speech. At that time, the field of artificial intelligence was old enough to become US president.
Also, using natural language to interact with digital computers has been a research goal since the advent of interactive digital computers. AI in the 80s tried to do this with expert systems.
With the current crop of LLMs, you could argue it's now a solved problem, but the problem is nothing new.