Instinct podcast notes: assistant race and competition from Meta Muse and Dots
Notes from the Noah Shinn interview: Instinct delivers on what Siri promised a decade ago, runs an always-on agent in a dedicated VM per user and grows about 10% monthly, but is constrained by iOS and faces Meta Muse, OpenAI Dots and Grok Bot.
Just finished listening to @noahrshinn. Kudos to @patrick_oshag for landing what I believe is Noah's first long-form public interview 👏 A few thoughts: 1/ Instinct delivered what Alexa, Siri and Ok Google promised a decade ago. A personal assistant that just works. You text it, it gets done. Feels like the biggest consumer moment since ChatGPT. 2/ On tech architecture, as I understood it: every user gets a dedicated VM running an always-on agent, deliberately over-provisioned on compute and multimodal intelligence so the experience never degrades. This reminds me of the early ASP model, pre-SaaS/cloud era. End result: growing ~10% mom (wow!) 3/ Instinct's biggest advantage is also its biggest constraint: iOS. iMessage gives them instant distribution to 1B+ users, but Apple ultimately decides what an agent can and can't do on the phone. Which made me think: Apple should just buy Instinct and let Noah reimagine what personal computing looks like in the age of AI. 4/ Their hardest problem isn't model quality, it's capacity planning. Over-provision and you burn cash. Under-provision and you lose a user for life. Software never had this dynamic. Instinct looks more like Uber or DoorDash than a SaaS company. 5/ We are at the beginning of a golden age of consumer AI. Meta's Muse, OpenAI's Dots and xAI's Grok Bot are all chasing the same prize as Instinct, and billions in VC and big tech capital are subsidizing the race. Just like the early days of eCommerce, ride sharing and food delivery, consumers are the biggest beneficiaries. 6/ The second-order effects of AI assistants are the most interesting part. Every business now has a new customer persona: the agent. That means rethinking core primitives (website, product catalog, checkout, returns and refunds, payments, loyalty) for a buyer that never scrolls, and doing it in a way that expands margins rather than compresses them. 7/ The bigger open question is how humanity responds. Do agents become indistinguishable from us, or do we demand a "sent by AI" label? And how willing will businesses be to transact with an agent instead of a person? We're about to find out. Overall, what an exciting time to be alive!
This post quotes another post: “Instinct founder discusses how to build a personal AI assistant”