Instinct is a personal AI assistant you reach by text or voice. You connect it to your email, calendar and accounts, then text or call it with what you need done, the way you would a human assistant. Early users, myself included, have had it negotiate down bills, cancel forgotten subscriptions, pay toll notices and file medical paperwork.
Chatbots answered questions. AI agents do the work.
In the past two months, three of them broke out. Meta launched Muse, SpaceXAI launched Grok Bot and Instinct went viral. Each of them wants your logins. Whoever holds them sits between you and every app you use. That is the most valuable position in technology, and the race to own it has started.
What they actually do
Muse, the errand runner
Muse is Meta's consumer play. It sends email, books travel, fills out forms, lowers bills, turns a recipe into a grocery list and checks out through Stripe's Link. You connect apps one at a time, and it asks before it sends an email or spends money. Meta says it never sees your passwords or payment methods. It runs on the web, iOS, Android and WhatsApp. The free tier carries a usage meter. Power costs $20 a month. Maximum costs $100.
Grok Bot, the back office
Grok Bot is not one assistant. It is a staff. You create named bots, each running on a persistent cloud computer, and teach them by showing them the work. One plumbing company owner runs dispatch and office admin through it. You might run an Inbox bot that flags missed email and drafts replies, a DealGuy bot that tracks price drops, and a Dispatch bot that assigns the crew every morning. Paid plans start at $20 a month, with usage billed on top. A month after launch it had 418,000 weekly users, according to Bloomberg.
Instinct, the chief of staff
Instinct is the most personal of the three. It reads your email, messages, screen, audio and location, and it texts or calls you first when something needs you. Users have had it find an in-network specialist and complete the intake forms, chase signatures across multiple parties, book trips end to end and deliver a voice briefing at 5:30 every morning. It is free, invite only and reportedly has more than 100,000 users.
Where they still fall short
None of this is autonomous yet. Instinct and Grok Bot both get stuck at CAPTCHAs and two-factor codes, and both still need a human to step in. Early testers caught Instinct sending an email without approval. Every Grok Bot on an account shares the same logins. These are early products with real access, and early mistakes.
The work is real. The question is who you let do it.
Whoever runs your errands sees everything
To book your trip, an agent reads your calendar. To lower your bill, it reads your statements. To chase a signature, it reads your inbox. Until now that data lived in separate companies. An agent holds all of it in one place, with permission to act.
That moves the decision. Today you pick the flight, the restaurant and the plumber yourself, across a dozen apps. Hand over the errand and the agent chooses. Merchants stop selling to you and start selling to the software that shops for you.
Search decided which websites you saw, and the largest ad business in history grew on that one position. An agent does more than rank. It picks and it pays. Meta says Muse data will not reach its ad systems. Instinct runs free and is reportedly exploring advertising. The agent that runs your errands will also know what you are about to buy.
The few
Every platform shift comes down to the same fight, a few big companies against everyone else. Agents are no different.
Meta brings 3.6 billion daily users and put Muse straight into WhatsApp. Bloomberg reports it has already been downloaded four times as often as Grok Bot. SpaceXAI owns the model, the compute and the social network.
One company owns the audience. The other owns every layer from the chip to your inbox. Neither has to win on product. They only have to not lose.
Google won search and decided which websites got found. Apple and Google won mobile and decided which apps got installed, taking a cut of the sales in their stores. Each time, a handful of companies became the toll booth between users and everyone else. Agents are the next toll booth. The question is who collects.
The many
Then there is Instinct. One year old. No app store, no social graph, no data center. A 23-year-old founder, Noah Shinn, and a product you text or call like a person.
The market has priced it as a contender. Instinct has raised $1.35 billion. In late August it was valued at $2.5 billion. On September 28 it closed a $1 billion round at $10 billion, led by Sequoia, Benchmark and Coatue. Four times the valuation in about a month.
Three pressures will decide whether it lasts.
Compute: Dozens of inference calls per request, on infrastructure it does not own.
Capacity: Reportedly already full, with response times slowing.
Revenue: None disclosed, and no public pricing.
Instinct is the test case for the many. If the best independent product reaches escape velocity before distribution closes the gap, the agent layer stays open. If it does not, the few decide what you buy.
Who you let in
For three years the fight was over models, over who trains the biggest one and who gets the chips. The next fight is over agents, and it is closer to home. It is about who holds your logins.
I judge these agents on one question. When it chooses for me, whose interest does it serve? Muse, Grok Bot and Instinct all do real work today. Only one of them has no platform to protect. I want Instinct to make this a real fight. Competition keeps the platforms honest, and users win when that happens.
Bashar Aboudaoud
Managing Member, UpRound
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