You are being short sighted. Imagine an assistant AI who reminds you that you shouldn’t be eating that donut because your doctor told you that you are pre diabetic. To have an AI companion would mean you could offload a lot of cognitive work and focus on other things… I keep thinking of the English gentleman and his man servent

There is a great sci-fi series Psion where the protagonist sees the corporate AIs as a totally distinct “life form” whose recognition is beyond comprehension.

There have been documented cases where a human who is suffering from short term memory loss repeat themselves verbatim to a given stimulus. This leads me to believe that one of the missing links is only short/long term memory.

Nice Floyd reference. That’s my point though. Once LLMs like chat gpt start to talk to themselves in an ongoing internal conversation like what happens with ourselves then we will get to the point where a true conversation happens