Hoping to find hidden gems in our home city and with $100 (£77) each in our pockets, we – Natasha Bernal in London and Amanda Hoover in New York – asked 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 claims to intertwine the minds of all publicly available AI chatbots, including ChatGPT, Claude, Llama, Anthropic and Perplexity, as well as 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 departure points, dates and times, with a few caveats: Amanda wanted her New York tour to be dog-friendly; Natasha was keen to avoid the busy tourist traps of London.
The results were, frankly, pretty crazy. Littlefoot has no concept of time or space or what a human might find interesting at this point. The recommendations ranged wildly from the incredibly niche (climb a hill in south-east London) to the incredibly vague (go to London Zoo, no further instructions). The same attractions, like the London Eye, the Namco Funscape arcade in Romford, a cycling studio in Brooklyn, kept appearing in recommendations, to the point where we suspected they were paid advertising. (Bigfoot has confirmed that this is not the case, and that it has no plans to offer sponsored choices.)
It recommended back-to-back gym sessions in London, a concert and helicopter tour in New York that were out of our budget, restaurants for lunch that wouldn’t open until dinner, and routes that would take us through our respective cities. In London, Bigfoot’s mapping feature showed two of four suggested destinations in completely wrong locations, a problem the company says it’s working on.
“While we expect to face typical challenges as an early stage company, we’re confident we can overcome them as we raise more resources and continue to refine our approach based on user feedback,” said Bigfoot CEO Alex Ward. “We’re a preseed startup of six, and itineraries don’t have to be perfect yet. But we’re working to do everything we can to get there in the not-too-distant future.”
Bigfoot says its features, which currently rely heavily on the location you enter and how you phrase your search term, have been tested by 70 to 80 alpha users this year, and that the company is refining the platform based on feedback.
A day out around Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in London
I chose a day around the 560-hectare sports village, with pedalos, a track cycling arena and tennis courts. I had never been there before and thought it would be great fun. It wasn’t.
My day began at 10 a.m. at WIRED’s central London office. First stop was in East London, for dinner at a place called Pizza Union, which didn’t open until 11 and whose pizzas, Littlefoot claimed, cost £6. (Wrong.) Armed with Google and a buddy, fellow Londoner and WIRED contributor Sophie Johal, I marched to the tube for the three-mile ride to Aldgate East, a place I can say with certainty that no one goes there voluntarily.
