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Invest Like the BestThe $10B AI Assistant Challenging Meta's Muse, Grok's Bots, and OpenAI's Dots
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At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Instinct’s bet: a proactive personal agent with trust-first economics
- Noah Shinn presents Instinct as a personal assistant designed to act end-to-end on the internet via text, calls, email, and a “computer,” aiming to remove the need for new apps or complex interfaces.
- Real user behaviors discussed include automated shopping workflows (wardrobe scanning and ordering), personal finance cleanup (identifying and canceling subscriptions), and high-leverage travel planning executed from a single user intent.
- A new “trusted person network” enables agent-to-agent coordination for tasks like scheduling while enforcing permission levels and surfacing trust violations as social and technical controls.
- Shinn argues trust grows over weeks as users gradually share sensitive access, and he describes safety architecture like content “firewalls” and decoupled monitoring systems that can intercept actions.
- He frames the business model as central to alignment, rejecting ad-style incentives and instead envisioning merchant-funded distribution via transaction take rates, while wrestling with compute scaling under rapid growth.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasInstinct is positioned as an “AI that acts,” delivered through familiar channels, not a new app.
Noah Shinn says Instinct is built to “act for you” across everyday life tasks, using a phone, a computer, email, and calling/texting as the primary interface, rather than requiring a new app. He argues this matches what people have been expecting AI to do since first using ChatGPT—help end-to-end, not just answer questions.
Users are already using agents for high-friction, high-inertia tasks like shopping and subscription cancellation.
Examples discussed include wardrobe scanning to generate outfits (including visual try-ons) and then buying items, and connecting bank accounts to identify subscriptions and cancel them end-to-end. The host and guest highlight that reducing friction turns “inertia-based” consumer businesses vulnerable.
Agent-to-agent coordination is framed as a permissioned network built around trust and granular access.
Shinn describes an Instinct-to-Instinct “trusted person network” where agents coordinate directly—especially for scheduling—while users set different permission levels for different relationships (e.g., spouses vs. colleagues). He also notes social enforcement dynamics, like alerts if a trusted contact appears to probe beyond granted access.
Instinct’s roadmap trends toward less UI and more ambient, voice-first interaction—while capability expands.
Shinn says the product’s long-term impact is a new way people interact with software, with “no interface” as the direction: more voice, action-button workflows, and eventually always-on audio-style interactions. He also argues software experiences could collapse into one interface that generates whatever presentation is needed on the fly.
Trust is treated as a measurable funnel, and sharing sensitive access is a key retention inflection point.
On trust, Shinn says it often takes weeks, and cites internal metrics: about three weeks in, there’s a 40% chance a user has shared a personal credit card; he describes this as a proxy for trust. He also claims retention rises sharply (around 80%) once users share at least one sensitive item.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesThis is probably the most exciting software race ever, and the outcome is like trillions of dollars.
— Noah Shinn
We actually don't even have an application. Like this is not a new app. This is not a new tool. It's a new experience.
— Noah Shinn
Time to like first credit card, or time to first account password, or time to first a sensitive piece of information, these are proxies for, for trust, and we actually highly value this and we take it very seriously.
— Noah Shinn
As a programmer, as a technologist, I just don- I don't want to build that, that reality. I, I think that that is a very... I think that's a very dangerous, dangerous reality.
— Noah Shinn
What does it mean when, uh, the amount of compute that you need access to is, is, is now doubling effectively every week?
— Noah Shinn
High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.
