I mean, in 2001 it was easier to feel hopeful about technology, but also they had no hope of actually building a "digital actress." They made a very realistically modeled and rigged CGI character that may have been fit for general purpose, that you could re-use that asset in other film projects. What they had was a very advanced puppet; it still took animators and a voice actress to make Aki go.
Now they're getting closer to being able to actually deliver that idea, that they're going to cast a computer generated woman in stuff. Weird to me that they're bypassing video games for Hollywood. I suppose the risk of an LLM going off-script when exposed to hundreds of thousands of players. in real-time.