Language models weren't considered "AI" until very recently.
Research, really theory, in the area of AI has been around for decades but focused on artificial intelligence rather than how to weigh and compress massive amounts of written language to used by a text predictive algorithm.
Natural Language Processing is a long-standing area of research in the field and, though it hasn't always been based on ANNs, ANNs have themselves also long been considered AI regardless of application.
My understanding has always been that language processing, language models, etc. have long been considered a necessary prerequisite to AI and research was often done as part of the AI field but was never itself considered AI in isolation.
Calling LLMs artificial intelligence is either (a) cheapening the meaning if intelligence, (2) embellishment for the sake of fund raising, or (d) subtle acknowledgement of vastly more powerful systems behind the LLM tools than is currently being publicly described.
It's hard to cheapen it more than perceptrons and expert systems. The lay impression of artificial intelligence may be all skynet and c3p0, but AGI isn't really even a goal of most AI research, let alone representative of the current state of the art.
What is your definition of artificial intelligence?
OpenAI has an explicit goal of developing AGI for the "greater good," whatever that means. If LLMs are indeed AI, as many assume, then OpenAI would fall squarely in the space of AI research that is the current state or the art.
