system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Can we create a single cell organism with basic chemicals/compounds? If it occurred naturally 4 billion years ago, can we recreate this event in a lab?

If it's already happened, sorry!
gpt
Not yet.  There is a lot of work going on in this direction, and progress has certainly been made (such as simple cell membrane-like structures).  But it has only been maybe 20 years since we even began having technology to begin looking at this problem, and it is an enormously complicated problem that early Earth had hundreds of millions of years to solve.  It will take more time.