Who Wins The AI Assistant Wars? + Why Didn’t Google Build Muse?

Alex Kantrowitz (0:00)

Who will win the great personal AI assistant war? And why didn't Google build its own version of Muse? That's coming up with MG. Siegler right after this. This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put a Gentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience and what companies need to get right in the AI era. Then, I sat down with Adam Mitchell, head of Enterprise Business Solutions at VOIA Financial, to go inside a large scale Gentic CX transformation, including the business decisions, trade-offs and lessons along the way. You can watch both conversations now on my YouTube channel today.

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Welcome to Big Technology Podcast. It's the first Monday of the month and joining us for his recurring spot is MG. Siegler of Spyglass. We're going to talk today all about the personal AI assistant war, which was brewing at the beginning of September, but now has basically escalated into a full-blown battle, war, legendary tech face-off that will continue to resonate for months after this. We're going to also discuss the one glaring company that doesn't seem to have a competitive product here, which is Google, although you could argue that some others are there, but Google especially should have it. So in we go, MG., great to see you again. Welcome back to the show.

M.G. Siegler (1:51)

I am really hoping my computer doesn't crash during this recording because I'm running so many assistants right now. Like it's, if you just look at my activity monitor on my Mac, it's near meltdown. I have a good amount of RAM, so I'm okay, but it's, I'm pushing some limits here.

Alex Kantrowitz (2:07)

Now this is not a sentence or not an opening you would have anticipated at the beginning of the month because, or the beginning of last month, because in September, on the 1st of September, you wrote this, no one has nailed the true personal assistant experience. And while you can finally at least squint to see elements of it, it's still hard to see how anyone will in full. Now we have obviously Muse for Meta, we have Instinct, which I think you wrote a little bit about in the piece, we have OpenAI, DOTS, we have Grokbot, I guess Microsoft has entered the battle in its own way.

So personal assistants are the flavor of the month. And it seems like, and actually we're curious to hear your perspective on this, that it's not just going to be a flash in the pan, it seems like this is a new product experience that we're just seeing the early days of that is going to stick given the advancements in AI capabilities. So I actually would love to hear you at the beginning of our conversation today. You know, go back to your thinking there on September 1st and talk a little bit about what's changed or if anything has changed and where you think this current moment in the AI personal assistant wars is going to go and then we'll get into who might win.

M.G. Siegler (3:19)

Yeah, that post, sort of the impetus behind it was somewhat driven by instinct as you mentioned because I felt like, you know, it feels like months ago already, but even just a few weeks ago, certainly on all the social media feeds, I feel like a lot of VCs in particular were just touting Instinct, which is a new startup in the agentic and specifically sort of personal assistant use case role. And so we saw a lot of love for that. Now, you know, this is the world I come from. I know how this operates. Like VCs feel like they got to give some love on social media so that they have any shot of potentially getting their foot in the door if there happens to be a deal coming down the pike.

Alex Kantrowitz (4:04)

This is a good secret of VC Twitter. Are you saying a lot of what we see on VC Twitter is just attempting to get some allocation around?

M.G. Siegler (4:13)

Am I suggesting that some of these tweets have ulterior motives behind them?

I can't imagine that that would ever be the case. Some of this might be financially motivated, perhaps. But yeah, I mean, obviously, you read these as like, oh my God, is this the greatest thing ever? Instinct is cool. And so I signed up for it, got access to it, to their credit. They were ahead of this trend, which we'll get to, some of the other players coming in.