Robert TaFounder & CEO, Clarity · Building Hyper-Personalized Agents

The $2.5B AI agent with no interface

7 Oct 2026 · 2 min

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1:32

In this short conversation Robert Ta introduces Instinct, an AI‑driven personal assistant that claims to have no traditional user interface. Users interact with it solely via text messages or phone calls, and the model operates on the user’s phone and computer just as a human would, accessing email, messaging, screen, audio, location, and connected apps. The onboarding experience is described as simply texting the model to start. Robert shares personal anecdotes: Instinct saved him $550 by handling tasks such as booking a restaurant reservation and warning him about a phishing scam, but also wasted $64 on a mis‑executed action, raising concerns about security and privacy. He notes the company’s public landing page touts a $10 billion valuation claim, while the founder suggests a more realistic valuation of around $2–2.5 billion. The discussion balances enthusiasm for the hands‑free, proactive capabilities with skepticism about hallucinations, financial risk, and potential security nightmares.

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Instinct is a personal assistant that understands what you're working on and what's important to you, connects to your applications and devices, email, messaging, screen, audio, location, and more. The interface is simple. There are no interfaces. It's trained to use a phone and a computer. You could text or call it. It uses its device in the same way that humans do. Instinct's core model is trained to understand and handle the deeply personal nuances of everyday life, following up on threads you've dropped, proactively calling or texting you, Arranging a ride to the airport, booking a handyman for your apartment, and much more. Get started. This is pretty cool. Like a pretty cool way to onboard people is just text them, like text the model or the product. So Instinct, hang on. Is this really their website?
$10 billion landing page. This is their landing page. Are you serious?
That's wild. So real quick, Instinct's founder says the viral AI agent's hallucination could spit out what it looks like a stranger's data. I think I found an AI agent worth the risk. Instinct saved me $550, booked my restaurant reservation, and warned me about a phishing scam. It also wasted $64 and might be a security nightmare. It looks like a $2.5— I think it's a $2 billion valuation company.
If we jump over to Instinct for a second, I think one of the things they did really well that I hear, I haven't really used it a lot myself, is the memory structure. And we had a nice article about like how Instinct built the memory structure. And it kind of looks like this, like the wiki system that Andrej Karpathy described, where it was a bunch of markdown files. Being managed by a Git system, so a version set of Markdown files.