With high hopes of discovering hidden gems in our home cities and $100 (£77) to spare each, we (Natasha Bernal from London and Amanda Huber from New York) asked an AI to plan our 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. The chatbot claims to combine the knowledge of all publicly available AI chatbots, including ChatGPT, Claude, Llama, Anthropic, and Perplexity, as well as 50 other sources, including Tripadvisor and Google. Bigfoot claims to use three different language models as its “AI agents” to create the itinerary:
We gave Littlefoot our respective departure locations, dates, and times, along with a few caveats: Amanda wanted the New York tour to be dog-friendly, and Natasha was adamant about avoiding the crowded tourist spots in London.
The results were, frankly, pretty weird. Littlefoot has no concept of time or space at this point, nor any concept of what humans might be interested in. Littlefoot’s recommendations ranged from the incredibly niche (climb the hills in South East London) to the incredibly vague (go to London Zoo, with no further explanation). The same attractions appeared so many times in the recommendations – the London Eye, Namco Funscape Arcade in Romford, Cycling Studios in Brooklyn – that I wondered if they were paid advertisements. (Bigfoot has confirmed that this is not the case, and has no plans to offer sponsored recommendations.)
Bigfoot recommended back-to-back gym sessions in London, a concert and helicopter tour in New York that was out of my budget, a lunch restaurant that didn’t open until dinner time, and itineraries that would have me crisscrossing each city. In London, Bigfoot’s map feature showed two of the four suggested destinations in completely wrong locations, though the company says it’s working on the issue.
“We expect to face challenges common to early-stage companies, but we’re confident we can meet them as we acquire more resources and continue to refine our approach based on user feedback,” said Bigfoot CEO Alex Ward. “We’re a six-person pre-seed startup, and our plan isn’t perfect yet, but we’re committed to doing everything we can to get there in the not-too-distant future.”
Bigfoot says its functionality currently relies heavily on users’ specified location and how they describe what they’re looking for, but that it’s been tested with 70 to 80 alpha users this year and that the company is improving the platform based on feedback.
A day at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in London
I spent the day centred around the 560 acre sports village, which features pedal boats, a track cycling arena and tennis courts. I had never been there before and thought it would be great fun. But it wasn’t.
My day started at 10am in the WIRED offices in central London. My first stop was in East London to eat at Pizza Union, a place that didn’t open until 11 and that Littlefoot said cost £6 a slice (wrong). With the help of Google and fellow WIRED Londoner Sophie Johal, I hopped on the tube and set off on the three-mile journey to Aldgate East, a place I’m pretty sure no one would go to on their own accord.
