With high hopes of finding hidden gems in our hometowns, and with $100 (£77) each burning in our pockets, we – Natasha Bernal from London and Amanda Hoover from Fresh York – asked AI to plan the perfect day.
We decided to operate Littlefoot, a local AI 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, which supposedly entangles the minds of all publicly available AI chatbots, including ChatGPT, Claude, Llama, Anthropic, and Perplexity, in addition to 50 news sources like TripAdvisor and Google. Bigfoot says it uses three different language models as “AI agents” to create travel itineraries.
We gave Littlefoot our starting points, dates, and times, and outlined a few caveats: Amanda requested that her Fresh York City tour be dog-friendly; Natasha wanted to avoid crowded tourist spots in London at all costs.
The results were, honestly, pretty crazy. At this point, Littlefoot has no concept of time, space, or what a human might find intriguing. His recommendations range from the incredibly niche (climbing a hill in southeast London) to the incredibly unknown (a trip to London Zoo, with no further instructions). The same attractions — like the London Eye, the Namco Funscape shopping arcade in Romford, a bike studio in Brooklyn — kept popping up in the recommendations, to the point where we suspected they might be paid ads. (Bigfoot confirmed that this isn’t the case, and that he has no plans to offer sponsored picks.)
It recommended gym sessions in London, a concert, and a helicopter ride in Fresh York that were beyond our budget, restaurants for lunch that didn’t open until dinner, and routes that would allow us to cross cities. In London, Bigfoot’s map feature showed two of the four suggested destinations in completely the wrong locations, something the company says it’s working on.
“While we expect the typical challenges of early-stage companies, we’re confident we’ll be able to overcome them as we gain more resources and continue to refine our approach based on user feedback,” says Alex Ward, CEO of Bigfoot. “We’re a six-person startup in pre-seed, and the path isn’t perfect yet. But we’re working to do everything we can to get there in the near future.”
Bigfoot says its features — which currently rely heavily on location and how search queries are worded — have been tested by 70 to 80 alpha users this year, and the company is improving the platform based on feedback.
A Day at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, London
I chose a day focused around the 560-acre sports village, which includes pedalos, a track cycling arena and tennis courts. I had never been there before and assumed it would be great fun. It wasn’t.
My day began at 10 a.m. at WIRED’s central London office. My first stop was in East London, to grab a bite to eat at a place called Pizza Union that didn’t open until 11 a.m. and that Littlefoot said cost £6. (That was a mistake.) Armed with Google and a companion, fellow Londoner and WIRED staffer Sophie Johal, I walked to the tube for the 3-mile trek to Aldgate East, a place that nobody goes to willingly.