Twelve years ago today, Eugenia Kuyda stood up on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt and presented a conversational chatbot called IO that acted as a lifestyle concierge to help people book restaurants and vacations along with other tasks.
IO, the first product from her startup Luka, came before the deep learning breakthroughs that would eventually lead to today’s large language models. “It still worked,” Kuyda told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview. “It was pretty magical…but, of course, it’s nowhere near what we have today.”
