Instinct

I got an invite to the viral AI assistant Instinct over the weekend. I have been playing with it for about 48 hours. I have also told everyone I know about it and liberally sent out invites. It's hard to emphasize how rare this is for consumer products. The last time I did this level of recommending was for Noice, best understood as the "Trader Joe's" of India. In the last 48 hours, my Instinct has:

• Built Instamart (Quick Commerce) and Amazon shopping carts to my liking
• Found obscure products I needed on niche ecommerce websites
• Excellent at hotel recommendations and is currently co-ordinating a weekend trip with my wife's and father-in-law's Instinct (outcome TBD)
• Booked me a visit to Amazon's BLR8 Fulfilment Center (post on that is coming up next)
• Understands voice notes! No more typing phew
• Answered general purpose questions as well as any chatbot

Everyone has been impressed with the elegant UI of no app and only Whatsapp/iMessage. While that is a great product choice, I am far more impressed with the actual utility of the product which is clearly from exceptional agentic capabilities on computer use & particularly web browser use. I rate it's web browser use on par with or better than GPT-6 Astra and definitely better than the tiny playwright based agents I have built myself. This is a classic case of the Instinct team having identified a problem with 0/10 market risk and 10/10 product risk. There is no question that all of us can and will use and will pay for AI assistants. The question was making them work, and Instinct team has solved it.

[EDIT post AI discussion] Now, we wait for the true signals:

• total $ value of tasks completed autonomously i.e. with 0 human input (If I am using Instinct to mainly to book meetings vs hotels dictates whether I can monetize as a consumer subscription or % of value.)
• token $ spent per successful task (obviously, as this is the biggest line item for any AI application. Instinct's S&M will be ~$0 at this stage given it's spreading via invites organically.)

These two metrics will define if Instinct can be a business, and if so, what type of business. [This is not to say that one won't look at traditional consumer metrics such as DAU (total, % of signups), active time, # of messagees, W1 and M1 retention etc.etc.]