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World's first AI chatbot has finally been resurrected after decades

ELIZA is famous as a rudimentary artificial intelligence and the first ever chatbot, but versions found online today are actually knock-offs because the original computer code was lost – until now

By Matthew Sparkes

17 January 2025

Joseph Weizenbaum created the ELIZA chatbot at MIT
From the image archive of the documentary film “Weizenbaum. Rebel at Work”

A groundbreaking chatbot created in the 1960s has been painstakingly reconstructed from archived records and run for the first time in over half a century, as part of an effort to preserve one of the earliest examples of artificial intelligence.

ELIZA was written by computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in just 420 lines of code. The AI model is extremely rudimentary compared with today’s large language models (LLMs) like the one behind ChatGPT, but…

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