instinct is as good as advertised
Almost nobody engaged with the product claim; friends piled on about ordering South Indian food in New York and suggested he stick to dosa back home. One reply admired the guerrilla marketing, another raised privacy concerns.
A week with Instinct and i'm not going back. what really works: 1. On whatsapp: replies in seconds, reacts with an emoji when nothing needs saying, have 10+ different tasks simultaneously and all from where I already spend time, no new app needed. 2. Voice notes: I ramble a half formed voice note about a trip. It does the thing asked and comes back with solutions 3. It verifies: flights checked on the airline's own site. asked about supplements and it read the actual lab tests before naming a brand. 4. It sends receipts: screenshots of what it saw, the article it got the information from, the Airbnb link, etc. I never have to ask "where did you get that." 5. My current rails, not theirs: I book through my HSBC portal for 6x points. It'll book through the portal if asked. every other tool wants to drag you into its own checkout and quietly cost you the points. 6. Standing tasks: it's watching a flight I need on specific dates and tracking my card offers, running daily without me. Pings only when there's actual money in it. 7. It just knows the job: told it my first triathlon is coming up, it built the list of everything I need to sort out before then. Easily worth paying money for, hmu if you want an invite.
Mostly a queue forming at the door: at least six replies asking for invites. One said no other assistant, Poke included, had come close, and a quote-post ranked it above every tool the author had tried.
Instinct is fking insane, love it
ICYMI the scoop that set VC group chats ablaze yesterday I broke the story of late drama around Town's new round at $1B - and how a top-tier firm, Index, pulled back its lead termsheet following a complaint from rival AI assistant startup Instinct t.co/a8FP9pLNfx
this is just another week in ai : > retro raised $21m > owner raised $240m > instinct raised $350m > wonderful raised $550m there has never been a better time to build.
Instinct is to consumer agents what Perplexity was to AI search. (This is an endorsement, not a criticism)
Made my first ever Swiggy order via AI and I'm convinced most of small ticket purchases in future are going to be done by an AI agent. Halo is now the first ever AI assistant to be able to perform fully automated 2FA agentic payments on iOS in the most secure way possible. How it is better than Instinct? - Browser use done completely on-device - Your credit card details are never seen by the LLM and remain in your local secure vault - Agent is able to automatically fill OTPs, supporting the most widely used 2FA method in India - Enables true payment automations such as "order milk every thursday" using your credit card Here's a demo of the first real order placed in Swiggy using a credit card and an SMS OTP. The demo below is uncut and took roughly 4.5 mins, subsequent flows would be faster as agent learns from its previous interactions (such as selecting address upfront). Here's how it works: 1. Stores your credit card details in a secure keychain vault. Any access to secure vault is gated by FaceID by default (03:00 in video) 2. Data from secure vault is then injected directly into the browser/terminal, the LLM will never actually see your card details 3. Shortcuts automation gives Halo access to your SMS, Halo will listen for new OTPs and fill them automatically Video Summary: - Agent correctly navigated and added the right dish to cart but failed to select right address - Realized default address was wrong and fetched available addresses from Swiggy and presented the nearest one - Asked for final payment confirmation and FaceID to fetch card details - Waited for automated shortcut to run an intent in background to fetch the OTP - Injected the OTP and completed the payment on Razorpay This was one of the more technically challenging feature I've built so far and I'll write an in-depth post about it soon. Get Halo:
me fighting the urge to ask for instinct invite
Instinct is great for assistant-type tasks with ‘un-gated supply’. But fails for ‘gated supply’ tasks (eg hard to secure reservations, places which curate their guests, scarce inventory sold through human gates.) I use @auroramastery for these gated type tasks where global partnerships with top tier hotels, restaurants, experience providers gets you access to the ‘inaccessible.’ For example; a month ago I decided I want to do the Marathon du Médoc. The places were long since sold-out. Through their relationships with French Chateaux they secured me 4 bibs, planned all the travel with the best rates and upgrades at hotels. From day 1 Aurora always focussed on gated supply and brand in the HNWI segment being their moats. Frontier models were always going to commoditise access for the mass & mass affluent markets.
finally got Instinct invite, lets see what's the all hype about lmao
ok now i get the hype of instinct. have some spare invites, DM if you need one. i’ve used poke before, this has 10x better UX. such frictionless setup, very outcome driven. these guys are probably running best in class browser automation + harness in the backend.
Started using Instinct yesterday evening and I can already see its use case for me to handle pointless admin tasks with ease. So easy to onboard!
My instinct agent became very worried about me this morning lol
