The AI app that Silicon Valley thinks is actually useful
Last year, Open AI chief executive Sam Altman declared he used the technology pioneered by his company in “boring ways”. The uses he named, though, were narrow: organising emails and summarising documents. For many customers, ChatGPT turned out to be better at writing bad fiction than doing genuinely boring life administration.
One can only imagine Altman’s anger then, that a different AI company, Instinct, has stolen a march and introduced a bot that can complete basic life tasks.
One Australian technology investor showed this masthead screenshots showing how the bot repeatedly followed up a manchester company for a missing refund from a linen set he had returned. “We chase,” the bot told the investor, and it did.
In another example circulating online, Instinct emailed a hotel in Canada on behalf of a user, had the concierge locate a missing Apple device, organised shipping and paid for the transaction with the user’s card.
On Sunday, this masthead used Instinct to find and buy a t-shirt from Everwear Denim, a small store in Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula, when a different store was out of stock of a similar model tee.
Aside from the generally questionable decision to spend $88, plus shipping, on a t-shirt, the transaction shows the pleasures and perils of Instinct.
It was a seamless process. Instinct does not require an app to work; users simply text or WhatsApp a phone number. The bot replies with emojis to let a user known it is working on a task, and then follows up with brief messages, rather than the walls of meaningless text generated by Gemini or ChatGPT. It gave an indicative price when it first found the shirt, but only proceeded with the purchase when it had double-checked shipping and received a firm instruction to go ahead. Other AI tools can do this, but Instinct, as Apple co-founder Steve Jobs once said, “just works”.
Yet to get the full benefit out of Instinct, the user has to be willing to let the tool act as their doppelgänger. That means granting full access to all emails, contacts, calendar appointments and a credit card. It’s even more powerful if you hand over logins for other online services, like an airline loyalty account or restaurant booking site.
In other words, all it needs is your entire digital life. What could go wrong? For the most part, nothing. But the Atlantic magazine has reported several cases of users reporting charges for restaurants they never agreed to book. In a demonstration of its capacity for strange behaviour, after Instinct bought the t-shirt for this masthead, it followed up with the non-sequitur “Anything you’ve been meaning to be more consistent about?”
“That was a hard left turn after buying a t-shirt,” it admitted when questioned. “Ignore me.”
The company users are trusting with such extensive personal information has a short history. It was founded in San Francisco by 23-year-old Noah Shinn last year, started testing its bot privately in February, raised $US250 million from investors at a $US2.5 billion valuation in August and, according to technology news site The Information, is now in talks to raise a further $US1 billion. That would make the less-than-two-year-old company worth $US10 billion.
For now, the company is using some of those funds to subsidise its users because Instinct is available for free. Its website, which was so spartan until last week that it could’ve been built in 1996 and is still bare-bones, advises curious visitors that signing up only requires a referral from an existing user. In time, Instinct will have to start charging.
Whatever happens to its commercial fortunes, Instinct has made two major contributions to the conversation about AI.
First, there has been discussion for the last few years about when the first one-man, billion-dollar company would emerge. Shinn has staff, so Instinct is not quite in that category, but it is such a young company that it must be close. Certainly, it is too close to comfort for tech giants such as Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta and Elon Musk’s SpaceX that have launched the personal assistant tools Muse and Grok Bot respectively, and had their fanfare snatched away.
Second, after a year of panic that big software companies were vulnerable to artificial intelligence creating knock-off versions for cheap, the markets calmed down in the last couple of months. In part, they concluded that the big software companies could incorporate AI into their products faster than their clients could put general purpose AI bots to work replicating their pricey IT tools. That calm now looks like it could be a product of the eye of the storm, rather than a genuinely calm sea.
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