With high hopes of finding some hidden gems in our home cities and $100 (£77) each burning a hole in our pockets, we (Natasha Bernal in London and Amanda Hoover in New York) asked an AI to plan the perfect day.
We decided to use Littlefoot, an AI-powered local discovery chatbot that can generate experiences in 161 cities around the world. It was created by Bigfoot, a startup founded by former Airbnb executives Alex Ward, James Robinson, and Shane Lykins that aims to tangle the minds of all publicly available AI chatbots, including ChatGPT, Claude, Llama, Anthropic, and Perplexity, plus 50 information sources like Tripadvisor and Google. Bigfoot claims to use three different language models as “AI agents” to create itineraries.
We told Littlefoot our respective departure points, dates, and times, and threw in a few caveats: Amanda requested that her New York tour be dog-friendly; Natasha was obsessed with avoiding the crowded tourist spots in London.
The results were, frankly, pretty crazy. At this point, Littlefoot has no concept of time or space or what a human being might find interesting. Its recommendations vary wildly, from the incredibly specialized (climb a hill in south-east London) to the wildly vague (go to London Zoo, with no further instructions). The same attractions (like the London Eye, the Namco Funscape gallery in Romford, a cycling studio in Brooklyn) kept popping up in the recommendations, to the point where we suspected it might be paid advertising. (Bigfoot has confirmed that this is not the case, and that it has no plans to offer sponsored selections.)
It recommended back-to-back gym sessions in London, a concert and helicopter tour of New York that were out of our budget, lunch restaurants that didn’t open until dinnertime, and itineraries that would have had us crisscrossing our respective cities. In London, Bigfoot’s map feature showed two of four suggested destinations in completely the wrong locations — a problem the company says it’s working on.
“While we expect to face the typical challenges associated with a startup, we are confident in our ability to overcome them as we acquire more resources and continue to refine our approach based on user feedback,” said Alex Ward, CEO of Bigfoot. “We are a shortlisted startup out of six companies and the itineraries are not yet destined to be perfect. But we are working to do everything we can to achieve that in the not-too-distant future.”
Bigfoot says its features, which currently rely heavily on the location you provide and how you word what you’re searching for, have been tested by 70 to 80 alpha users this year, and the company is refining the platform based on feedback.
A day at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in London
I chose a day centered around the 560-acre sports complex, which features paddleboats, a track cycling stadium and tennis courts. I had never been there before and assumed it would be a lot of fun. It wasn’t.
My day started at 10am at the WIRED office in central London. The first stop was in East London, for lunch at a place called Pizza Union, which didn’t open until 11am and which Littlefoot said offered £6 slices (he was wrong). Armed with Google and a comrade, Sophie Johal, also a Londoner and WIRED staffer, I headed to the tube for the 3-mile ride to Aldgate East, a place I can safely say no one goes to voluntarily.