The science fiction AI of my childhood was Cortana, who was a lot more cool than a relentlessly proactive token torcher which burned 12 bucks to fix some CSS.

You can literally make Cortana with modern LLMs. Or something close to it. Especially as models like this are trained: https://thinkingmachines.ai/blog/interaction-models/

Sorry, I should've been more specific; like jrflowers said: the Cortana I was referring to was the AI character from the Halo series. I did have a Windows Phone though and thought the Cortana assistant was one of the coolest things back then!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortana_(Halo)

I think GP meant Cortana from the Halo video game series and not the start menu bar widget