The problem with that theory being that you’re talking about technologies/theories that have been around for more than half a century, and in all that time we’ve never yet figured out how to use them to convincingly emulate conversation the way LLMs can. If what you are describing was possible, we’d have been doing it twenty years ago. People were trying. For Character.ai to have come up with that kind of solution, they’d have to have solved the exact problem that LLMs solved, only with some kind of magical technology with none of the drawbacks of LLMs. That’s sort of like saying that all Theranos had to do was invent a product that actually did all the magical things they claimed they could do. Sure, yeah, I guess if they’d done that everything would have been fine.