Reading up on Instinct

OpenAI’s Dots launched last week and they've taken over @every. A few things that stand out: They protect your attention. Over the weekend, my Dot posted my model-testing results to Slack and brought back replies. I could keep working without opening Slack and disappearing down a rabbit hole. My weekend stayed pretty clear and calm. They’re useful for the little things you miss. People at Every are using them to pull important information out of school emails, catch missed Slack messages, and flag account-access requests. Voice makes them useful away from your laptop. Our head of video was talking his Dot through video edits while running around getting our launch out. The ecosystem matters. Dots feel roughly at feature parity with Muse, Instinct, and Grok bots. But having an agent connected to the ecosystem you already use for work and life is a real advantage. If you use ChatGPT, I recommend trying one. Permissions are still frustrating. I have to approve the same basic thing multiple times, and sometimes even after I approve it, my Dot says it can’t do it. That needs to get fixed. I’m less convinced we’ll stay loyal to the characters. Mine is named Boo, and I’m attached to him. But I felt that way about my OpenClaw agent, too. When something better comes along, I switch. In a year, I expect to be using a persistent agent. Boo will probably be dead. RIP, Boo. I get into all of this at the start of this week’s podcast, and then sit down with @bigwilliestyle to talk about where we go from here. In a lot of ways, Dots and GrokBots remind me of a wave we went through with OpenClaw eight months ago. We talk about personal vs. company agents, why we built our own company agent, and whether companies will end up with a whole shadow org chart of agents. Full episode below.

@danshipper

Instinct in group chats Starting today, early access users can add Instinct to group chats. A new Instinct joins and works for the whole group. Making plans with friends usually turns into a frustrating back-and-forth over times and places. With Instinct in the group, you can explore options together, agree on a plan and get it done, all in one thread. Your friends don't even need Instinct to join in. A few things it’s good at: - Planning a weekend trip with friends, including dates and arrival times - Coordinating logistics with a roommate - Getting tickets as soon as they go on sale, then splitting the cost and sending one to everyone - Running a fantasy league, keeping standings, settling rules disputes, and reminding everyone to set their lineups - Sorting out carpool schedules - works out who’s driving each day from everyone’s schedules - Organizing Thanksgiving, keeping track of who’s bringing what and ordering the shopping list Group chats are new territory for Instinct, and we put a lot of care into getting the permissions right. Here’s how it works: - Your personal Instinct asks before connecting with the group’s Instinct. You choose which groups to trust and can remove trust at any time. - The group’s Instinct has no direct access to your personal accounts. Your Instinct checks your permissions before sharing information or taking action. - If someone new joins the group, all pending replies from your Instinct are held until you grant it permission to share with the expanded group. Group chats are available to all of our early access users, and will be rolling out to everyone soon. To join early access for this release, ask your Instinct to put you on the list. Great work with @GajanNagaraj @anuda_w and @saagarwashere

@noahrshinn

Muse, dots, Instinct, and the question every agent will be asked

@worldnetwork

Instinct is the most impressive products I have ever tried. Even more so coming from such a young and clear-minded founder. Why do I like it? It’s proactive, smart, whimsical and generally delightful to use and makes you really feel like you are interacting with a top-tier human personal assistant working 24/7 to ensure every part of your life goes smoothly. After having tried OpenClaw/Hermes and all the coding harnesses, none of them really compare. Instinct has implemented the absolute freaking best memory system out there. It remembers everything and brings it up in surprising ways even making connections between different memories unprompted. It’s also crazy how proactive it is and how it seems to bring up what’s relevant just at the right time. I have been using it for travel, shopping, booking things, coordinating with my gf and friends for events and playing tennis (different Instincts can talk to each other on behalf of the owners). It’s truly incredible.

@frankdilo

I reverse-engineered Instinct's memory. Here's exactly how it works

@DhravyaShah

I just read what Zuck wrote about Muse connectors. A few things I think this means: 1. We’re witnessing the agentification of consumer apps. 2. Zuck believes Muse reaching 100M+ users feels entirely possible. 3. Whoever you connect to becomes your new landlord, so pick carefully. 4. Connectors become the new app listings (valuable real estate). 5. Being early could be as valuable as being early to the App Store in 2009. 6. Meta sees what people want, which providers convert, and what users will pay. That gives it the power to rank connectors, charge for distribution, and launch competing services. 7. The opportunity map includes agent native APIs, connector agencies, SEO for agents, identity and reliability infrastructure, and vertical connector marketplaces. 8. We’re moving from humans choosing apps to agents choosing businesses. 9. Every business will need an agent strategy, just like every business needed a mobile strategy. 10. Kinda crazy to say but a 3 person API company could reach 10M+ users through one great connector. 11. Connectors could create an entirely new second-order economy. The biggest opportunity may be helping businesses distribute, price, and optimize their services for agents. 12. Your API becomes more important than your app. Weird to think about but true. 13. Zuck wants Muse to own the moment between wanting something and getting it. He is coming for the app economy. Will he win? Right now it's Instinct vs Muse vs Grokbot. TBD.

@gregisenberg

Yet to see an example of something grok bot, instinct, muse etc can do that codex or claude can’t do with the same prompt

@frantzfries

fantastic product (!!)- you're hitting on something bigger than Instinct: it's not just the giants who can eat your lunch anymore. anyone can. three years ago, building something was grabbing a couple of people, raise a little seed, put your head down, and ship in three or four months. That window was the moat. Three or four months of creativity with a little wind at my back, enough to build momentum so that by the time anyone cloned us, we were already two steps ahead. Now, two things scare the shit out of me. first, (online)social connectivity is at an all-time high. ideas propagate wider and faster than they ever have, and they reach the right people. second, AI has 10-20x'd output, and it did it without seed capital. seed money was its own barrier. you had to know high-net-worth people, pitch them, and close the round - now I can point AI agents at any app, catalog every feature, and have a working clone in a day or two max. and we're at the very beginning. what takes AI days today will take hours in a few months. so where's the moat? brand. trust and loyalty, and most likely to individuals rather than companies. If @tferriss launches a productivity app, you take it seriously in a way you never would with a random App Store listing. If @hubermanlab ships a longevity tracker, you're checking it out. In the short term, brand trumps everything. which brings it back to Instinct. there's no question every major AI player has already spun up teams to build a competitor e.g. Muse. that's what makes this moment so exciting: the barrier to entry is next to nothing. It's also what makes it terrifying: the barrier to entry is next to nothing.

@kevinrose

TL;DR of my new article: the 9 Instinct prompts people are actually running. Instinct is three weeks old and invite-only, and The Information says it is already in talks to raise another $1B at a $10B valuation, two weeks after being valued at $2.5B. The public argument about it is a privacy fight. Meanwhile the people who actually have it are quietly using it to find money. I ran @slashlast30days on it eight times, then six direct X sweeps, and pulled the 9 prompts worth stealing. 💰 The unclaimed-property sweep. @peterpham's tip got him $845. My tightened version got $2,182.72 across 5 properties, found my SSN proof, and signed the forms off a passport photo. Then @morganb ran my exact wording and posted $2,222.57 🧾 @EliLanger's Amazon back-refund audit: a numbered checklist across your ENTIRE order history, not just recent orders. His run took 5 hours over 16 years of purchases. Check the refund card is still active first ✈️ Track the fare after you already bought it and chase the airline for the difference (@DavidPawlan). It tracked fine, then needed a human for the actual call 🔭 Monitor-and-book as a standing order. @VoyageBliss connected secondary frequent-flyer accounts instead of his primary, and scoped a read-only token for everything else. Read-only, single purpose, revocable 📸 Screenshots plus "can you do this for me". Six words got a soccer registration form filled, a password reset, and a birth certificate pulled out of an old email ☎️ Bill negotiation with a hand-back. @pitdesi went $100 to $60 on Comcast. When it hit a wall it handed him the number AND the exact script. The call took 3 minutes 📬 Forward the email instead of connecting the inbox. Your Instinct got its own address on Sept 8, so you can hand it one thread instead of your whole account 🔍 "Show me your activity log." @jbahrdestefano got banned by Resy, asked his bot what it had been doing, and found a reservation monitor quietly running 200 API requests an hour around the clock. He called the ban fair 🏷️ Make it prefix every message with an ALL-CAPS project tag (@EliLanger). Everything lives in one iMessage thread, and that is currently the only way to search it 🧨 The honest part: two of the nine payloads are the exact wording the person posted. I wrote the other seven from what they described, in the shape of the two that provably worked. And Reddit produced nothing usable in 8 runs, because everyone who can actually run these is posting on X

@mvanhorn

This was one of the best features of Instinct. Now in Grok Bot!

@mvanhorn

I’m Noah, the founder of Instinct. Instinct is a personal agent that we’ve been building for the past few months. The interface is simple: there are no new interfaces. You can text or call it. It's trained to use a phone and a computer in the same way that humans do. Instinct combines simplicity with extreme capability. I’m thrilled with everything our early users are doing with Instinct. They’ve told us they’ve planned cross-country road trips, bought weekly groceries and concert tickets, and cancelled hundreds of dollars of subscriptions. Someone’s even planning their wedding with Instinct. We want to make Instinct the best personal agent for all of you. It’s available in an invite-only beta program while we’re actively bringing up more compute. I’m excited to see what you all do with it.

@noahrshinn