In 2007, the iPhone had been a shock wave for the public, but also for developers, who saw in his technical sheet a real Eldorado. Sam Altman, still unknown to the general public, was part of this first generation of entrepreneurs who perceived on -board geolocation as a real technological leap. Loopt, which he created in 2005 then wanted to respond to this idea: Use the phone to connect people in real lifewhen they meet without knowing it.
As Altman summed up on the WWDC scene: ” Loopt is done to connect people when they move, because after all, that’s the first reason to be a phone ». The application displayed a real -time card, with a pins system to locate your friends, know where they were and what they were doing. The goal was to create opportunities to meet at the right time, without having to plan. Very ahead of his time, maybe even too much !
IPhone as an experimental laboratory
What Loopt offered at the time was to take full advantage of the new possibilities offered by the iPhone SDK 2.0, first of the name. Thanks to native access to GPS, contacts and cards, the application made it possible to see in real time where your friends were, to consult their recent activity (geolocated photos, statutes, comments) and to organize a meeting in seconds.
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On stage, Altman showed how, by directly integrating the APIs of Apple, it was enough for him to ” A line of code »To automatically generate an itinerary to a friend available, ready to have lunch two streets from there. Loopt thus transformed the iPhone into A kind of “dynamic social card” : it displayed contacts, but also suggested places nearby to facilitate the organization of more spontaneous meetings.
A first draft of one of Altman’s obsessions
Unfortunately, Loopt has never really imposed himself in uses and the startup remained on the sidelines, quickly overshadowed by services like Foursquare,, Google Latitude or later Find My Friends. It was a relative commercial failure, but between the lines of this aborted project, we already found The common thread that crosses the entire Altman’s journey. Its desire to exploit in real time context signals (in 2008, geographic position and social activity) to generate natural and automatic interactions.
If we think about it, this logic, We find it more than fifteen years later with Chatgpt. The generative AI, as it is developed today, is designed to capture the maximum of implicit signals in our intentions (conversation history, questions, the formulation of our prompts) to offer us, almost instantly, the most relevant answer possible. Without our necessarily needed to express all the details of our request.
Loopt sought to guess that a friend was two streets and lunch organized in a tap, Chatgpt is now trying to anticipate the information or the expected solution. The same logic of context anticipationbut this time applied to more richer information volumes and levels of interpretation.
Loopt belongs today to the notes of pages in tech history, but that is not a reason In order not to attribute a meaning to it. Endowed with these 16 years of hindsight, we can undoubtedly say that the project was showing Altman’s vision constant : transform gross information into decisions or concrete actions. A red thread that Altman never let go and that he continues to hold firmly.
Little reminder, the next WWDC would take place this Monday, June 9 at 7:00 p.m. Monday, to follow it, go there!
- Loopt was the first adventure of Sam Altman, a pioneering mobile application in geolocation to connect people in real life, taking advantage of the new features of the iPhone.
- Despite a limited commercial success, this project revealed a constant in Altman’s vision: contextual anticipation.
- This same logic of interpretation of signals to generate relevant actions is found years later in Chatgpt, but this time applied to information and language.
By: keleops ag
