I think the difference now is that traditional software ultimately comes down to a long series of if/then statements (also the old AI's like Wolfram), whereas the new AI (mainly LLM's) have a fundamentally different approach.

Look into something like Prolog (~50 years old) to see how systems can be built from rules rather than it/else statements. It wasn't all imperative programming before LLMs.

If you mean that it all breaks down to if/else at some level then, yeah, but that goes for LLMs too. LLMs aren't the quantum leap people seem to think they are.

They are from the user POV. Not necessarily in a good way.

The whole point of algorithmic AI was that it was deterministic and - if the algorithm was correct - reliable.

I don't think anyone expected that soft/statistical linguistic/dimensional reasoning would be used as a substitute for hard logic.

It has its uses, but it's still a poor fit for many problems.

Yeah, the result is pretty cool. It's probably how it felt to eat pizza for the first time. People had been grinding grass seeds into flour, mixing with water and putting it on hot stones for millennia. Meanwhile others had been boiling fruits into pulp and figuring out how to make milk curdle in just the right way. Bring all of that together and, boom, you have the most popular food in the world.

We're still at the stage of eating pizza for the first time. It'll take a little while to remember that you can do other things with bread and wheat, or even other foods entirely.

maybe not on their own - but having enough computing power to use LLMs in a way we do now and actually using them is quite a leap.

You're talking about non-deterministic algorithms, who yes are often associated with AI but existed way before LLM's