Instinct was the buzziest AI agent around – can it survive Muse?

Before there were cute little guys, there was instinct.

In August, the startup got its AI agent to market with an unusual playbook: invitation only, no marketing, and barely so much as a website. And yet, Instinct quickly became the buzziest thing in AI, garnering praise for its simple, SMS-based interface and its ability to handle tasks like booking DMV appointments and sending follow-up emails.

Then Muse arrived, not long after Dots. The same products, more or less, from two far more powerful companies.

With big tech players suddenly in the mix, it seemed doubtful that the startup’s buzzy startup could keep it ahead of the competition. But in my own testing, Instinct held its own against the other two agents, handling online tasks about as well as a robot can. And the founder of Instinct, Noah Shinn, is not impressed by the rising competition.

“AI assistants are all we know,” Shinn tells me over email. While OpenAI and Meta AI build products for a range of customers, Shinn believes Instinct’s focus sets it apart. “We focused solely on building a personal assistant for everyday life that just gets it.”

Shinn was an early employee of Sierra—another highly regarded startup with a serious Silicon Valley pedigree—before striking out on his own to start Instinct. The quiet release quickly picked up steam with praise from testers and a massive vote of confidence from investors. The company was valued at $10 billion in late September, even after the launch of Muse. There is no app and no monthly subscription fees (for now). You need either an invitation from a current user or approval from a waiting list. I was approved after just a few hours.

Instinct’s AI assistant can do many of the same things I’ve had Muse do for me, and to some extent OpenAI’s Dots. The kind of life administration tasks like swimming signatures and appointment confirmations that pile up with alarming frequency in a household of one child and two adults with full-time jobs. These are consumer-friendly versions of the agents like Codex and OpenClaw that software developers have been using for years.

You chat with them much like a chatbot, but they also have access to a virtual machine and can plug into your personal email and calendar. And while Muse’s cuddly bear mascot and Dots’ anthropomorphized blobs feel like obvious attempts to reach a wider consumer audience, Instinct feels distinctly different.

Conversations with the Instinct Agent happen via text – either via iMessage, WhatsApp or email. There is no cute little guy. No imagining it sitting at the laptop, typing on a keyboard. Just short answers, the occasional emoji reaction, and much more action than talk. It’s as effective as I think we can reasonably expect an AI agent to be at the moment, but the limitations of a robot doing things in a human world are just as real.

If you want to sign Instinct on a particular website, you’ll get a link to enter details in a “secure vault,” and you can connect it to a variety of services, including your Google Workspace, Slack, and Notion. But otherwise the interface is just your text messages. It’s kind of genius, and it means Instinct is everywhere you send and receive texts, like CarPlay or on your watch. It’s just quiet in the area, which is either ideal or creepy, depending on how you feel about AI agents. I thought it was a bit of both.

Shinn says the lack of a traditional app interface is a crucial part of what he thinks separates Instinct from the big players. “While AI platforms excel at answering questions and queries, Instinct integrates seamlessly into people’s lives to turn conversation into action,” he says. “Just like texting or emailing your personal assistant, you can do the same with Instinct.”

The instinct didn’t impress me at first. After a few introductory messages, it took my Cincinnati area code as an invitation to send me a link to the investigatorits website and a number of flight search results between CVG and SFO. Thank you? I told her I no longer live in Cincinnati. “Ha,” it said. “Note – I’ll keep that in mind from now on.” But after giving it a steady diet of meaty tasks over the past few weeks, it’s impressed me more often than not, though I don’t think I’m any closer to reaching some sort of productivity nirvana.

I gave Instinct the somewhat vague task of finding swimming lessons for my son – something I’ve been meaning to do for years, but always seem to put off. I asked him to find lessons suitable for his age; it came back with a list of job results. I suggested the neighborhood community center, and it shifted gears to focus there. I opened a browser and followed to check against his suggestions. The times and dates with which they all checked out – a very low hurdle cleared. But it missed one crucial piece of information: The center has a prerequisite class for children who enroll in preschool hours. I caught this detail by accident, and it highlights a challenge AI agents face: They’re great with a clean set of data, but the Internet was made by humans, and often the data sucks. Sometimes an important piece of information is hidden in a pop-up window.

The Instinct handled some other tasks well, like emailing my eye doctor’s office to make an appointment and doing the digital paperwork to start an Ikea return. Beyond just filling out a few forms for me, it was surprisingly good at handling vague instructions. I had it search my past Ikea purchases, and it found out what product I meant by “it is vertical and white and has similar branches of it.” (Tjusig, for those keeping score at home).

Several times it surprised me by presenting relevant information that I did not explicitly ask for. I began my email inquiry for the eye doctor by acknowledging that I could not remember the exact name of the office. Instinct limited it to my description, and later in the conversation it noted that I had a confirmation email from 2024 from the doctor, just to reassure me that I had the right place by email. Separately, Instinct also marked a potential conflict on my calendar while it was doing another job for me. Filling out forms like a big, fancy autofill machine is one thing, and AI agents are quickly proving to be good at it. But identifying accurate information and proactively bringing it to my attention feels like a real step in the right direction actually to help.

Expect to pay for all of this in the future. When asked if Instinct will remain free, Shinn replied that “Instinct is free for invited users. Our intention is to keep it as affordable as possible.” Avi Greengart, an analyst at Techsponential, notes that a venture-backed startup like Instinct’s primary goal right now is growth. “The business model is growing as fast as you can to establish something worth paying for,” he says, pointing out that a company like Instinct could look at revenue from its customer base and/or an acquisition by a larger company.

OpenAI’s Dots are only available to paid subscribers right now, while Meta’s Muse is free to use. “If you don’t pay for it, then the goods and services you’re looking for can cut deals to get access to your agent,” Greengart theorizes. He acknowledges that the current economy is a little wonky because agents are now largely used by early adopters, but he thinks the old adage is true. “If you don’t pay for it directly, you pay for it indirectly,” he says.

That may mean more advertising in the future, according to Greg Ireland, a senior director at IDC. “The fact that these agents are so transactional, or commerce, or shopping-heavy, just makes it a natural fit,” he says. In fact, Instinct has already participated in pushing “recommended products” to its users. Companies have many incentives to make this advertising palatable to consumers, but Ireland believes that advertisements play a role in one way or another. “All roads in the consumer market eventually lead to advertising,” he said says