Noah Shinn - Building Instinct: The Personal Agent

Patrick O'Shaughnessy (0:01)

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I can't help but wonder about the grand game that is afoot here. When you really step back and think about what is happening right now, what is the game, what is going on here right now? If you had to sum it up, the thing you're in the middle of.

Noah Shinn (1:42)

You're going up against the biggest players in the world. The window to do it is actually on the order of months.

The compute required to it is over $$$ just this year alone, and you have no distribution advantage, but you have this massively growing viral product.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy (1:58)

What do you do?

Noah Shinn (1:59)

This is probably the most exciting software race ever, and the outcome is trillions of dollars.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy (2:18)

You know, I know this is the first time that you're talking about the business in this long form like this. I'm incredibly excited to ask you all about it. It seems like we're in a moment with personal agents that is very similar and arguably probably bigger than what we saw with cogeneration a year or so ago. Maybe frame this up for us to begin. Like, how are you thinking about the impact that, of course, your product, but these agents are going to have on the world? Why is this the area that you've chosen to dedicate yourself to completely?

Noah Shinn (2:46)

I think out of this will come a new way that most people on the planet interact with technology broadly. I run Instinct. It's a new company that I started about a year ago. So it's still a new company.

And we're building a personal assistant. I'm not going to spice it up because it's really just a personal assistant. And I think that the thing that has really enabled us to gain quite a bit of traction early and quite a bit of excitement early is it just works. Like it works in the way that I would say we all, like we meaning I am also a user, we all have really been waiting for AI to act for us. So I would say one interesting thing is that this is not like any other transformational consumer app experience where it's the founder coming on and saying, I have this new vision for the world where this is going to trust me on this and in a few years from now, you guys will all get it.

This is a very different moment of building product because you and I, we all already have this idea of what AI should act like. We've already had that idea since 2023 when we all started the brainstorm, when we started to use ChatGBT for the first time.

That agent that is able to help you with effectively anything in your everyday life, whether it's something new and creative that you want to do, whether it's something that you traditionally spend several hours on and it takes a long time to develop, it's just everyday intelligence. It's meant to be with you, to act with you. It's meant to feel like a very simple interface. When I mean simple interface, what I mean is 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. So it has a phone and a computer, so you can text it. You can call it. It can actually call you too. So I don't know if you've experienced this yet.