With high hopes from finding some hidden gems in our hometowns and $100 (£77) each burning a hole 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, a local AI-powered 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 plug the minds of GPT-4o and Claude 3 Haiku into more than 50 information sources like EventBrite and Google Places.
We told Littlefoot our respective starting points, dates, and times, and threw in a few caveats: Amanda asked that her New York tour be dog-friendly; Natasha was obsessed with avoiding the busy tourist spots in London.
The results were, frankly, rather crazy. Right now, Littlefoot has no concept of time or space or what a human might find interesting. Their recommendations vary widely from the incredibly niche (climb a hill in south-east London) to the vague (go to London Zoo, no further instructions offered). The same attractions, including the London Eye, the Namco Funscape arcade in Romford, a cycling studio in Brooklyn, came up in recommendations, to the point where we suspected it might be paid advertising. (Bigfoot has confirmed that this is not the case and has no plans to offer sponsored picks.)
He recommended back-to-back gym sessions in London, a concert and helicopter tour in New York that were out of our budget, lunch restaurants that didn’t open until dinnertime, and itineraries that would have crossed paths. our respective cities. In London, Bigfoot’s map feature showed two of the four suggested destinations in completely wrong places, a problem the company says it’s working on.
In a response to Wired, Bigfoot clarified that the incorrect locations are due to bugs in the main location API that Littlefoot uses, and that the company has been updating the product for a more accurate experience.
“While we expect to face the typical challenges associated with an early stage company, we are confident in our ability to meet them as we acquire more resources and continue to refine our approach based on user feedback,” says Alex Ward, CEO of Bigfoot. “We’re a preconfigured startup of six, and the itineraries aren’t meant to be perfect yet. But we’re working to do our best to get there in the not-too-distant future.”
