Lessons from the very first chatbot
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Hello, and welcome to The Verge Cast, the flagship podcast of If-Then Statements. I'm your friend, David Pearce, and today on the show, we're talking about chatbots, specifically the very first chatbot from the 1960s. It was called Eliza, and the way to think about it is basically as a very simple back-and-forth experience that you might have with a computer. One of the first instantiations of Eliza was this thing called Doctor, which would play therapist for you, and it would ask you how you were doing, and you would respond, and you'd say, I'm having a bad day. and it would go through and look for specific keywords and ways that you responded and respond back to you. And it was able to carry on a pretty functional conversation. It remembered things about you, it could ask questions, it could move things along, it could make connections. It wasn't very sophisticated, just a few hundred lines of code, but it worked. It was so effective that it convinced a lot of people that there had to be a human on the other end.
It was a fascinating product made by some fascinating people. And a group of academics and researchers and writers recently has excavated all of the source code of ELISA. And they've written a book called Inventing ELISA about where it came from, who created it, and the lessons it might have for us in the current world of AI. Because, spoiler alert, there are a lot of them. And the way that we think about computers really hasn't changed that much since the 1960s. It's going to be very fun. I'm really excited to dig into it. But first, here's everything else happening on The Verge today. This is 90 Seconds on The Verge for Tuesday, August 11th, 2026. Have you ever wondered why your Amazon emails are so unhelpful? They just say, like, your wireless accessory is confirmed instead of giving you anything useful or specific.
Well, Divergence Miyasato wondered too, and she found out that it's all about AI data. Basically, if Amazon puts your orders in the email, suddenly Gmail knows what you're buying, which means Gemini can do a better job of steering you to stuff you like on Google Shopping. Amazon says it's also about privacy and convenience, but this is a company that is also fighting perplexity and others to keep AI agents from taking over any of your shopping experience. because it's very important to Amazon that you go to amazon.com and accidentally click on a bunch of barely labeled ads. That's the business. Meanwhile, David Ellison, the CEO of Paramount, has reportedly decided to move his company out of California if the state's attorney general refuses to settle the antitrust case challenging Paramount's acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. This is all obviously a threat. The case isn't set to go to court until next March, and Paramount will start owing shareholders about $7 million a day this October. Ellison would very much like to not spend that money.
But if you're wondering how serious this plan actually is, Paramount reportedly hasn't even decided where its new headquarters would be, and it would be scheduled to move there in like six weeks. I'm not sure this is a real plan, at least not yet. Finally, we're only a day away from Google's next big launch event where we're expecting new Pixel phones, including maybe new Foldable, a new Pixel Watcher 2, and maybe even an AirTag-style Pixel Tracker. There's a big event tomorrow night hosted by Trevor Noah, but if it's anything like Jimmy Fallon's weird infomercial last year, you can safely skip that one.
You can read more about all this at TheVerge.com. That is 90 Seconds on The Verge for Tuesday, August 11th. Are you a pet owner? Every six seconds, a pet owner in the U.S. gets hit with a vet bill over $1,000. Always an unwelcome surprise. That's where Fetch comes in. Fetch is the most complete pet insurance for dogs and cats. According to ConsumerAdvocate.org, you get paid back up to 90% of vet bills at any vet in the U.S. and Canada, with claims paid back in as little as two days. Go to FetchPet.com slash save right now for your free quote. That's FetchPet.com slash save.
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