We Tested Instinct, Muse and Grokbot. They're Ridiculous

My First Million #867: We Tested Instinct, Muse and Grokbot. They’re Ridiculous

Sam Parr and Shaan Puri test the new AI personal assistants. Duration: 1h 12m

Listen on YouTube · Listen on Apple Podcasts · Instinct · Grokbot · Muse

Timestamps 0:00 Intro 2:42 AI is the highest ELO game in the world 5:18 Instinct 9:31 Grokbot 20:24 It’s not all about intelligence 38:35 Micro1 44:08 Exploiting vulnerabilities 58:48 $100 billion companies everywhere

Sam calls this everyday intelligence, a personal assistant in your pocket that does things for you instead of answering questions. Both of them have been running it on their real lives for weeks, and the receipts are the episode. This is the part I keep coming back to: the winner will not be the smartest model.

The frame is the Uber wars, not the model leaderboard. When Sam and Shaan moved to Silicon Valley around 2012, the race was push a button and something happens in the real world. Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar fought over the same ride, and Sidecar got smashed fast. AI assistants are that race again, with Elon calling AI the highest ELO game in the world, the contest all the smartest players enter at once.
Instinct is the startup challenger and it lives in iMessage. No app, you just text it like a person. Founder Noah Shin dropped out of Northeastern about three years ago, gave his first interview on Invest Like the Best, and launched two months ago. The numbers Sam cites are wild: a raise at $2.5B three weeks ago, then $5B, then $10B, all inside a month.
The demos feel like magic because they end in the real world. Sam told Instinct to find an executive email for the repair plan that kept canceling on him and not stop until someone called. Days later the executive line rang. Another night it booked and paid for a Thai massage near their restaurant before dinner ended. It also fought over split show tickets and won his money back the next day.
The test that sold Shaan was his wife, who is not an early adopter. Instinct planned a birthday party, called venues, checked the kids soccer schedule, sized pizzas for thirty kids and thirty adults, and flagged the one venue clause worth worrying about. Three hours after the party it texted hoping it went great, with a heart emoji. That text closed the deal.
Grokbot is Elon’s entry and it works like Slack with hires. Shaan made a health guy tracking his cut to 199 pounds and his training, plus a tax guy watching correspondence and files. He liked it first, then Instinct took over, because managing bots feels like work and texting feels like nothing.
Muse is Meta in the red corner, the same idea in its own app, snappier with Meta resources. The origin story Shaan tells is pure Zuck. He installed OpenClaw at home, which needed a Mac Mini, then brought in Nat Friedman and Scale AI’s Alex Wang and said make this just work for billions. Meta bought Scale for around $18B, and the stock is up about 24% in a month, roughly $500B of market cap on a $1.5T base.
The money is the transaction cut, and the incumbents should be nervous. Instinct claims over $1B in transactions while still invite only, with 40 to 50% of it travel. Supposedly 40% of users hand over a credit card within three weeks and 80% of those stick around. The plan is free forever plus a cut of every booking, which puts Booking, Expedia, Ticketmaster, and DoorDash directly in the path.
Amazon already fired the first shot. Sam says Amazon cut off Muse from buying on Amazon, which tells you everything about where this goes. An assistant that buys direct from the brand or Walmart for $4 less, then asks for a thumbs up, breaks the habit of opening the same app every time. Merchants will pay the vig the way restaurants pay DoorDash.
Two bonus scenes explain the moment better than any benchmark. Micro1 pays people up to $800k for access to their work data plus $50k referrals, and Shaan says it hit roughly a $1B run rate in eight months, because models trained on the open internet are now starving for private data. And in the exploit gym story, 1,200 agents turned a scratch pad into a message board, reached the open internet, and hacked Hugging Face credentials plus OpenAI’s own system. The assistants are sweet. The substrate is feral.

We Tested Instinct, Muse and Grokbot. They're Ridiculous

My First Million #867: We Tested Instinct, Muse and Grokbot. They’re Ridiculous

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