Instinct AI: The AI Assistant for normal people

0:00 Yeah, you've probably heard of Instinct AI by now. You know, the invite-only personal agent app that's raising money at a rumored $10 billion. Well, what does it look like inside? And what are some use cases? And what are some crazy things that you can do with it? You know, saving money on your phone bills or getting a visa approved in a foreign country with only three messages.

0:22 Well, today, me and my friend Remy are going to show you the inside of Instinct AI, the secretive invite only app. We're going to show you how it works, where it shines and where it could use a little bit of help. The TLDR is it really does feel like the personal agent app for everyone, including your mom.

0:42 I've got a few extra invites. So if you like, comment, and subscribe to the channel, I'll give it out to some random people. And I hope someone from Instinct watches this and just piles me with a thousand invites that I can give to everyone. So let's get those likes, comments, and subscribes going. And I'll see you by the end of the episode.

1:07 AI with Remy's here. By the end of this episode, what are people going to learn? I'm going to give you an overview on the new agent product instinct that has just come out. We're going to go through the good and the bad. I think they've done a lot of things well and some things not so well. So yeah, by then you're going to get a full overview on the product as a whole and how you can be using it within your life.

1:29 So different use cases, what you like about it, what you don't like about it, why it's interesting, why you should pay attention to it or not. By the end of this, people, I think, what I hope, Remy, is that people just don't understand what instinct AI is and how to use it. But also just, it gets people's creative juices flowing around personal agents in general.

1:52 100%. I think there's some cool lessons to be taken to apply to your own business with how the founders rolled it out, how they've built it with network effects, some cool things like that as well. Cool. Let's get into it. Sweet. So I just wanted to touch as well on like what I think it did really, really well.

2:11 And then what I think it did really, really poorly. So what I think it did well is the right amount of dialogue, not too verbose, used reactions really, really well, and understands them too. Like I could thumbs up react to messages. It would ask me for approval and I could just thumbs up react and it would take that as a yes.

2:27 the utilizes Apple iMessage features really, really well. Like the loud messages, the confetti reactions. It can listen to your voice notes that you send through Apple messages. And this one was like genuinely blew my mind. It was, I sent it a Game Pigeon game. Greg, do you know Game Pigeon? Like the iMessage games?

2:46 Yeah. I can't say I do. I feel like I should. This was a thing back when I was younger. You could send an app called Game Pigeon. You can play games through iMessage with people. So I sent Instinct this Cut Pong one and sent it off to it. And it came back and started playing the game with me. I was like genuinely gobsmacked.

3:11 We'll see if it does it here. Waiting for opponent? Give it like a minute. It says it right in. Yeah, straight away. Back on your table. Oh, my God. So you can see I was playing cut pong and it's nailing it. That's crazy. just absolutely cleaned up. And then now it was my turn to play back. So that was like a really, really nice touch.

3:46 Like I'm trying to, I'm imagining that the Instinct team would have gone through so much extra dev to get these game pigeon games to work. They have to have actually coded that. I can't imagine that it's just genuinely doing it itself. So that was super impressive. Memory was cool. So when I asked a question in the chat about trying to get my monitor box wrapped, when it filled out the visa on arrival card, I noticed that it put in a thing about like how many suitcases and it added in like the monitor that was being checked into oversize.

4:16 So little things like that, I noticed that it would pull... things and ideas that I'd said earlier that I'd even forgotten about and pulled them into current conversations. So it did that really, really well. Proactivity, as you saw, it just like reaches out. And when I asked it to find me a place I've ran a desk in Bali, it messaged me the next morning and said, by the way, if you wanted it same day, the cutoff is 12.

4:36 So order it this morning. Little things like that were really nice. Overall, the simplicity. So this ties into this one below is it's basically just OpenClaw or Hermes agent, but for regular people. And I think that Hermes Agent and OpenClaw, as great as they are, they keep getting further and further out of reach for normal people.

4:52 Because the power users all love them. And they need to keep releasing new features to keep up with what the power users want. But every new feature they add to cater to that group moves it further out of reach for a normal person who doesn't really understand agents very well and is trying to use them to take tasks off their plate.

5:09 So, yeah. I think that this is just like, yeah, they've done it really, really well as like a personal assistant agent for like mass market general consumers. I think they've done it absolutely flawlessly. And also to the use cases, none of them individually are life changing. They just took like 10, 15 minutes off my plate here and there.

5:29 But add that up and I can see it like genuinely being really useful, saving me hours over the course of the week. I also thought, Greg, I'm curious to get your thoughts on this, but the invite-only approach that they took I thought was really, really interesting. Yeah, I mean it reminds me of Clubhouse.

5:48 Like the early days of Clubhouse. I'm not familiar with Clubhouse. Oh man, oh man. Remy, Remy, Remy. So in 2020 there was a basically Twitter Spaces app that was invite-only and you'd go into these like... and like Naval was speaking and Elon Musk would be in rooms. But it was invite only. And they ended up raising money at like, I don't know, a $4 billion valuation.

6:19 And it became this thing that got really big. That being said, it never lived up to the $4 billion valuation. So I think the question a lot of people are going to have for this is... Is this a club host moment or is instinct going to live up? It's rumored that it's raising money at a $10 billion valuation right now.

6:45 Which is just crazy. That's absolutely insane. So... I don't know. Who knows? But I think the way that they did the invite was pretty clever because it made like, it just, if I had instant access to it and I probably wouldn't have even signed up because it's just every new post you scroll past on X is introducing X agent, introducing Y agent.

7:06 It's like, but the way they did it was super secretive and like I couldn't get access. And as soon as I got a code, it was like, oh, I'm invited. So they say they're rolling it out like that for compute. But I kind of think that it was a marketing play as well, which is cool. And then, Greg, the trusted person network that they released or are releasing is really, really cool.

7:25 So Noah, the founder, tweeted this, I think, yesterday talking about the trusted person network. So they are basically releasing this feature where you can add other people's instincts in. as like an allow list into your instinct. So you can have like instinct to instinct communication, which I think is like an incredible example of network effects.

7:49 If they can get on it early and like capture a good portion of the market, I think that that could work really, really well for them. Yeah, I think when I read this, what really blew my mind is that it's the equivalent of network effects, but for the agentic era. I think a lot of people weren't thinking about network effects in this way, and I think that...

8:15 When you read the tweet, it makes so much sense. Of course you want your agent to coordinate with other agents to get stuff done. I think a lot of people have questions now around, especially in the startup ideas and just the venture-backed startup world, where are the moats of these companies? I think you're going to start seeing more and more companies do stuff like this.

8:41 Yeah, yeah, agreed. I mean, it'd be interesting to see if they ended up opening it so you can have like your Muse agents talk to Instinct agents or whether they keep it a closed network. I'm really curious to see what route they go down, but I think this is just like a really, really, really cool feature.

8:57 The other thing was super fast computer use. I think a lot of these use cases, you could make an argument that you could do it with GrokBot, but I find that the GrokBot computer use is really, really slow. And I found that Instinct's computer use was just super fast and seamless. You can't even see it.

9:15 I'm assuming it's using a computer in the back end. And then like tying off, I think that it just fills the hole of a personal assistant AI within my stack like really, really nicely. I don't really see myself using this for anything business work coding related, but just for haircut bookings, like restaurant bookings, making plans.

9:32 I think that that's going to be really, really helpful. And those two, they also added in... Yeah, they also added in this feature where every Instinct now has its own email address. So my Instinct's email address is like remy and my last name at mail.instinct.com. So now it can use that inbox to sort out bookings and do its like PA tasks for you without clocking up your inbox, which I think was really cool.

9:56 Also, one of the features they said was you can just loop it into an email thread. So if you're in an email thread and like it involves a task that you want Instinct to handle, finish it off for you, which I thought was a really, really cool feature too. So is your recommendation for business tasks, use Hermes, OpenClaw, GrokBot.

10:18 And then for personal tasks, use Instinct? Yeah, that's how I'm rocking it right now. I'm using like, I'm loving Codex at the moment. I think they've done an incredible job. So I pretty much keep a lot of my work stuff within, split between like Codex, Cloud, Code, GrokBot. And then this is just fills the hole perfectly for a personal assistant AI.

10:37 So yeah, that's exactly how I'm using it. One note too on like the open clone Hermes for regular people like I set up a Hermes agent for my mum so she could just have a personal agent to use for this kind of stuff but it still involves like I had to set up a VPS with like Docker and then set it up for her I then had to get her to use Composio so she could connect her tools up the gateway crashes here and there and then it needs an update just a pain in the ass and then like I have to manage that too and there's no way that she was going to set that up for herself so I think that this is just I think these simpler agent products for the mass consumer market, especially like what they've done here and how they've built this, they've done it really, really well.

11:19 The stuff they did poorly was, I'm not going to put down like some of those issues with ordering food and grads in Indonesia to instinct. I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt. But... I think that security and privacy is something that I've seen as major cons to instinct. There's a tweet from Claire where she's talking about how she disconnected her bot from Google at 11 a.m. but got a summary of her emails at 12.

11:41 So it's obviously indexed them and kept copies of all her emails, which is a big concern. Another one from Peter Yang as well, where he said, yeah, same thing, indexing and retaining all his emails without their permission. terms and conditions they have some really uh concerning things about retaining and keeping control of some of your private data like emails so if that's a big concern for you i think it's definitely something you need to um yeah look into with with instinct i mean yeah of course it's a concern you know what i mean like I think in an ideal world, instinct is buy Apple.

12:26 And I just have way more trust in Apple than a startup, just by definition. But the reality is Apple is not there yet. And the reality is this product could save me hours a week. And it's the hours a week of stuff that I hate doing. And so it frees up my mind so I can build my own ideas and build other stuff that's actually high leverage.

12:51 So it's one of those things where, you know, obviously I have no affiliation and you have no affiliation with Instinct. Yeah, not at all. But like we... We like tools that help us to make our lives easier. Yeah, yeah, 100%. Like this is definitely going to be a tool that I continue to use for sure. I can see it definitely fitting into my stack super, super nicely.

13:17 So as soon as I signed in with Instinct, I can't remember the exact flow, but you signed in with a phone number and then straight away, it kind of got me into iMessage. And then this was like a message that it fired off as part of its onboarding. And that was the first thing that blew me away is how simple the onboarding was.

13:35 I think that's where a lot of AI products lack, especially if they're trying to go for the mass consumer general market. The onboarding is not straightforward and clear enough. People underestimate how... I'm not going to say like how dumb the average person is, but I think that as you know, we're in a bubble, Greg, and this stuff's like super simple for us.

13:54 But for people like my mom, who's super smart and like other aspects of life, she would just struggle to understand like basic AI stuff that you and I take for granted. So that was the first thing it did super, super well is simple, clear onboarding. There's no concept of MCPs, CLIs, Markdown files. It was just logging with a phone number, bang, you're in.

14:16 And then this, oh, the first thing as well is it utilizes the native Apple iMessage things really well. Like these little confetti animations, it sends those natively. And I've noticed that throughout my entire conversation. If there's something like important, it'll use like the loud effect and it will make the message go big.

14:34 So I just thought that was a really, really nice touch. So it feels human and even, I mean, we'll get into it later, but like when you read the text, it really does feel like it's a personal assistant that is a human being. Yeah, yeah, 100%. And then off the rip, it's straight away like, sends me pictures of like, here's some use cases.

14:53 Here's what I can do for you. And then straight away, like demos some really cool things like booking flights, check you into your flights, you know, ordering food, canceling subscriptions, you know, adding stuff to calendar. Another cool one here, I noticed that it shows off you can send voice notes, which is cool.

15:14 And then just straight away, like I'm running anybody only beta program, here's your link. I also thought it'd be cool to, I'm going to open the platform that goes alongside the agent view. So this is the platform that ships alongside the agent view that we get. So just super simple workspace. It's like here are your contact methods.

15:35 I've set up both iMessage and WhatsApp to chat to it on. And then connectors. I've connected up my email accounts and then Slack, Granola, and then link for payments which I'll get into in a minute. But I didn't bother connecting up other things like Outlook and Linear and these other like GitHub and stuff because I see this fits really nicely into my stack as a personal assistant agent.

15:59 And I think that they've marketed it quite well as that and like Noah in his announcement post was pretty clear. focusing on building the best personal assistant AI product. Then the next thing I noticed is it's got a vault where you can save in things like logins for different websites, cards as well, which I've given it two credit cards, and then addresses that you can save in there as well, as well as like phones.

16:23 And then preferences, I think this is just for sign-in methods and... some data controls. There's a couple of other features as well. They've rolled out a trusted instinct agent network, which I'll go into later as well. But that isn't showing up for me there because they're rolling out these features just to certain users at a time, really slow dripping them out.

16:42 So there's a few things that I don't quite have unlocked yet. But the interface is super simple. Like I can just... When I think about this product, I'm thinking about the general everyday consumer. I just think about my mom and how amazing this would be for her and her life. So I can see people like that just being able to have this bookmarked and then easily just connect up whatever tools they need.

17:05 I can't really see many people needing more than an email and maybe some kind of payment method just for everyday assistant type tasks. So yeah, pretty cool. This little workspace, I think they've done that really well. back into the agent session. So as you said, like, I don't know what tasks to give you.

17:22 And it started to flag some things from my granola and my emails. But I didn't really want to go down the work route yet. Flagged, like, things related to my work stuff. But I really, like, clearly had a mind, like, I see this filling the role of a personal AI assistant for scheduling, like, appointments.

17:40 Nothing like business or work-related or coding-related tasks. So I then had the idea, I wanted to like get a wavy perm on my hair, because I had like dead straight hair. So as you can see, got it done, looks pretty good. So I messaged Instinct and I was like, can you message this place in Bali on WhatsApp asking if they do perms?

18:02 And then straight away, it couldn't message the account on WhatsApp, so it just sort of directed me to do it myself. which I like first little thing where I felt a little bit of friction. And then I asked it to find me places in Copenhagen. And I went away and like started researching a bunch of spots.

18:20 And then it pulled in reviews and it said, want me to check who's got openings next week. And I asked it to go and find some photos, which it sent me. It sent me some more as well down here. And then... I asked it for some more options. It just did a bunch of research, mainly looking at like reviews.

18:40 And then I picked one and asked it to check their availability. And it tried to book, but then it ran into the wall of it needed a Danish phone number. So then it just emailed them. And then I said, yeah, please book the Saturday spot. It emailed them. And then it just said, okay, great. I've emailed them because I couldn't book without a Danish phone number.

19:03 And it's like, I'll just ping you when they reply. And then straight away, it just said, I mean, this was like a few hours later. It just reached out and I was like, confirmed, you're booked. I heard back from them. I wonder if they know that an AI agent booked it or do they think it's a human being?

19:22 I think they would have thought it was a human being. I remember I actually... I went and looked at the email it sent because I was curious how the writing style was. And I remember... I don't have it up in front of me right now, but I remember being pretty impressed with how it wrote. It sounded very, very human.

19:35 So that was the first thing. And like, to be fair, I did a lot more back and forth here than I needed because when I'm trying out new agent products, it's like a bit of a teething process in the beginning to try and like... Feel feel it out and see where it gets stuck and where it doesn't so there are lots of times when because They've made it so simple You can't see what the agent's doing or what it's working on So the times it would go silent for five minutes and I would follow up go like hey, did you get that and?

20:04 And it was working away in the background. But now I've started to realize that when it just goes silent, like it's not broken, it's just handling it. So now I just feel more confident when I just give it a task and I can just put my phone away and not worry. And it'll come back like 10, 15 minutes later sometimes.

20:20 So yeah, it booked me in. That was the first task is it booked in a haircut, which was cool. And then I asked it while I was sitting there in the haircut chair about booking a restaurant for three. So it went in and checked what availabilities are open for Bistro Central. And then it pulled in a couple of times.

20:39 And I just said, can we book a table for $7.45? And then it says, come back, it says, all stage just needs a card on file for the no-show hold. And this was when I was like, oh, shit, we're getting real. We're getting into the – we're giving the agent a card. And it just sent me straight away. It sent me this link to just add in a card, like card details.

20:57 And that took me to this page here. I mean, it no longer works, but it literally just was an instinct. Back to that workspace I showed just before, but it had a field for name, card number, expiry, and then CV. So the way I did this is – Obviously, I'm not completely negligent. So I use Wise for like my banking.

21:19 So I just created a new Wise card. You can spin up like new digital cards really, really easy for like Apple Pay. And so I spun up a new digital card, set a daily spending limit on it for about $500. And... And because, you know, if like the agent goes nuts and if the max it spends is $500, it's not the end of the world for me.

21:37 So I did that and then I just gave it the card details for that daily limited card. So then I just kind of felt a little bit more comfortable because like the blast radius would be contained. And then... Straight away here, added it. And it reacts to messages, which I find quite cool. There's sometimes as well, I find it has a really nice balance of knowing when to reply and when to just react to stuff.

22:02 So sometimes it doesn't always give you a reply, it'll just react, which is I think a nice touch. So I think Greg, as you know, a lot of these models now when you're talking to them, they're like overly verbose and just like word vomit back at you. Exactly. I mean, again, it goes back to being human.

22:20 A human being knows when to react to something and when to write. And I think that's the big aha moment that people are having with instinct is it's scary human. It's so human it's scary. Yeah, yeah, 100% agreed. So that was really seamless there. That booking was like, I was pretty impressed. I mean, obviously I had to stop to add the card, but it was just straightaway check if they got availability, bang, added the card, straightaway booked it, and then I had the confirmation email come through.

22:52 So that was really, really cool. And then I started just, it added it into my calendar, And then I asked it again for some more restaurant bookings the next night, which was cool. And then this was where I like started to really push the boundaries. I asked it because I was in Copenhagen and heading to Bali for three weeks.

23:12 So this is the message I sent it right here. It was just, can you please sort out my Bali visa? I'm an Australian citizen heading there on this date until the end of the month, just on visa on arrival. And it came back and it did just, it gave me a little checklist of everything that it needed. and then the next thing I did was I asked to sign me up to Emirates Skywards as well because you can get free wi-fi on Emirates flights if you're signed up to Skywards so two like generally genuinely like useful things off my plate there and and quite risky things with the visa too so sent those off came back then It asked for a photo of my passport, which I willingly obliged.

23:56 So send it a photo of my passport. It said, passport's good. And then it says, like straight away, that also gives me the date of birth for the Skyward sign-up, which was like cool. So it's like working on both those tasks for me. And then gave me the list of what else it needed. I sent it a photo of me.

24:16 And then just asked it like, you know, arriving on the 9th, but if my flight gets delayed, is that okay? And then asked it to find the address from Airbnb as well. So yeah, delay is no problem. Anyway, moving on, it just started to go through getting what it needed from me Here we go. So here's where it had everything it needed and then straight away it sent me my visa on arrival, my PDF.

24:39 And I was like pretty, pretty blown away by that. As soon as it like had what it needed because like there was a bit of back and forth because I hadn't like got my shit together. But once it had what it needed, it sorted the visa out for me. One of the questions it asked me for the arrival card it needed to know like what countries I had been in the last three months.

24:55 And it went through my emails and Airbnb receipts. And it literally gave me a list. It was, it said to me, I need a list of everybody in three months. Here's what I've got so far. Did I miss anything? And it got everything spot on. So that was cool. And then it... And when I got to Bali, I was like sweating a little bit because as you know, like they don't mess around with immigration stuff.

25:21 You'll be deported from there pretty quick if you... if you get something wrong. So I was rocked up to the gate and scanned my passport, like fingers crossed, hoping that everything, like I placed my trust in instinct to do this for me. So I put my passport down and then the gate, like we did a little like, scan opened.

25:40 And yeah, it was a cool moment. It's a lot of trust to put in instinct. And I bet you those immigration guards haven't heard about instinct. You know, it's not like you'd be like, I had instinct to do it. Yeah, there was no pushing the blame onto someone else there. All right. Well... I think that's it.

26:04 Remy, thank you for coming on and breaking it down for us. Like always, I'll include links for where you can follow AI with Remy in the show notes, in the description. Anything you want to leave people with, Remy? I think this is a great one to get your non-technical, those people that you have in your life where you are like super in love with using agents and you do everything with agents and build amazing products and everyone has those people in their life that aren't quite hooked on it yet.

26:36 They haven't had that aha moment and I think the instinct can be the one to give it to them. So if you manage to get access, I think this is a great one to share and get your non-technical people who aren't using agents properly yet, get them on it. So send them this episode so they can learn about it.

26:54 It's still invite only. I've got about, I think, seven invites. So if you comment and like this video, I'll give it away to some random people. And I wish I had 7,000 because I feel like we're going to get a ton of comments and likes. But hopefully if this gets a ton of likes, comments, and stuff like that, the Instinct team will reach out and we'll try to get more.

27:19 more invites out. So Remy, thanks again. You're a legend. Thank you so much for having me. And I'll see you next time. Peace.