Sep 28, 2026 · 1h 13m
Personal AI agents challenge attention-driven software
Noah Shinn - Building Instinct: The Personal Agent - [Invest Like the Best, EP.493]
The episode examines whether trusted agents can act for users without turning personal data, attention, or autonomy into commercial leverage.
- 1Personal agents could coordinate tasks, relationships, and transactions across services while learning users’ preferences over time.
- 2Trust requires user control, secure data handling, proactive defenses, and alignment that rejects manipulating users for commercial gain.
- 3Agent adoption may reward transaction-based businesses while pressuring platforms whose economics depend on captive attention and application usage.
Don't miss
Shin rejects relationship-seeking AI modeled on Her, describing instead a socially aware, competent operator that earns trust and mutual respect.
The brief
Noah Shin presents Instinct as a personal agent that can communicate, browse, manage sensitive information, and complete tasks across a user’s digital life.
Examples such as retrieving event footage, organizing wardrobes, planning outfits, and canceling subscriptions show how broad an agent becomes when it acts across services.
The central tension is trust: proactive assistance depends on intimate data and memory, but the agent must remain aligned with the user rather than commercial incentives.
Shin sees agents reshaping commerce and software by handling reservations, bookings, and payments, shifting value from attention toward completed transactions.
Instinct’s invite-only rollout, long-term trust measurement, security testing, and compute demands reveal that dependable agency is as much an operational challenge as a model capability.
What was said on this episode
23 statements · 18 positive · 2 negative · 3 neutral
Instinct will create a new way for most people to interact with technology.
“I think out of this will come a new way that most people on the planet interact with technology broadly.”
Listen at 2:01
Instinct can perform essentially any internet task for users.
“It can do quite literally anything that you might want to do or that you do yourself on the internet.”
Listen at 4:24
Instinct will fundamentally change how users schedule calendar meetings.
“I think the way that you can find time on a calendar now is just so different where you just say your intention.”
Listen at 8:07
The internet will be substantially rewritten by agent interfaces.
“I do think the internet's going to be rewritten.”
Listen at 13:24
Most people will interact with software in fundamentally different ways.
“I think that the way that most people on the planet interact with software is going to be very, very different.”
Listen at 13:26
Agent-mediated reservations will increase users’ access to special restaurant events.
“That will result in more special events for the users being able to actually have a spot in the restaurant.”
Listen at 15:32
Instinct will use stored preferences to simplify future travel bookings.
“When you're staying anywhere in the future, it will be able to use that memory and be able to now make it a much easier experience for you in the future to be able to book that according to exactly what you want.”
Listen at 17:32
Instinct firewalls can block malicious content before it influences the agent.
“any piece of content, any piece of text, anything, any form of media that comes in that might be consumed by instinct goes through what we call these firewalls, which can intercept, that can reject, that can block malicious pieces of content coming in, hitting instinct and trying to convince instinct to do something.”
Listen at 24:06
Instinct should act according to the user’s interests.
“Instinct should act on behalf of what the user wants.”
Listen at 26:44
Instinct will monetize through a transaction take rate charged for merchant distribution.
“I see a blanket transaction take rate being enforced across the platform, which is just us exchanging distribution for being able to serve products on behalf of merchants.”
Listen at 28:40
Instinct aims to capture a relatively high distribution take rate.
“I'm looking at, can we provide so much value that we're on the upper end scale of this?”
Listen at 30:57
Most digital services and industries will be transformed by agents.
“I think most digital services or industries are going to be not disrupted, but just changed and transformed.”
Listen at 32:56
Proactive agents could automatically arrange rides and eliminate booking friction.
“What if instinct always had a car lined up for you every time where you need to be so that it's out of your mind to know in five minutes I need to order this Uber because I need to be in this place in 45 minutes and there might be traffic.”
Listen at 34:40
Businesses benefiting from transaction volume will gain from Instinct’s lower friction.
“if your business benefits from more transaction volume, even at the cost of less time on the application, then you're going to be in a really great spot because Instinct is going to make it 100 times easier to do that.”
Listen at 37:36
Product builders should prioritize understandability over showcasing capabilities.
“let's not focus on capability. Let's only focus on understandability.”
Listen at 41:23
Instinct is currently among the most capable AI products.
“I think that Instinct is quite capable and is one of the most capable products out there.”
Listen at 44:11
Instinct’s user base was growing approximately 10–11% daily.
“now I believe we're like 10% or 11% day over day.”
Listen at 46:38
Instinct matches Opus 5 performance at comparatively low cost.
“we're able to deliver the same performance as Opus 5, which is now, I guess, we're dating ourselves, frontier-level intelligence.”
Listen at 50:29
Proactive agents will require orders of magnitude more compute than expected.
“the amount of compute that is going to be needed is going to be orders of magnitude more than what we thought that we needed.”
Listen at 53:19
Software will converge into a single easy-to-use interface.
“I think that all of software is going to collapse down into a single very, very easy to use interface.”
Listen at 1:03:28
Agents will progress from daily tasks toward pursuing users’ higher-level objectives.
“I think that it will start towards pursuing a higher level. objectives that are aligned with teaser where the user is able to describe not just, hey, can you track this workout for me?”
Listen at 1:03:49
Small businesses will increasingly operate entirely on Instinct.
“I see small businesses being run now that are native to instinct itself, meaning the entire business is now run on instinct.”
Listen at 1:04:22
Instinct should not pursue relationship-building with users.
“relationship building or anything in that area. is not something that we want instinct to do or to pursue or to develop with users.”
Listen at 1:05:39
Statements are attributed to the speaker as said on the episode and reflect their view at the time, not PodLume's. They are not advice.