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.
Solved in the sense that the core idea has been realized but unsolved in the sense that it isn't the sort of safe, reliable, deterministic interaction that was commonly envisioned.