Key facts
- Instinct, an AI personal assistant, is experiencing a slowdown in its speed.
- Instinct users report delays in answering questions and completing tasks.
- Meta's AI agent Muse has an advantage due to owning its data centers, allowing for arbitrary scaling.
- Instinct founder Noah Shinn previously acknowledged slower responses last month.
- Meta's chief AI officer Alexandr Wang mockingly referred to Instinct as 'Insect' and stated Muse is faster.
Users of Instinct, a popular AI personal assistant, are reporting a slowdown in the app's speed when answering questions and completing tasks. This comes as the startup faces intense competition from Meta's Muse, which has a significant advantage in computing resources.
One avid Instinct user, Rex Lowther, noted that the app "acts more like a person who might forget to do something," citing instances where it failed to provide timely notifications. Hang Huang, a founder, commented on X that smaller startups like Instinct struggle to scale their infrastructure to meet the demands of AI agents.
Alexey Tumanov, a professor of computer science at Georgia Tech, explained that companies like Meta, which own their data centers, can scale more effectively. Venture capitalist Vinay Iyengar stated that while Instinct and Muse are at "feature parity," Muse has an edge because it "will never have compute outages," leading him to "churn" from Instinct.
Instinct previously experienced a slowdown last month, with founder Noah Shinn acknowledging the issue on X. The app, which predates Muse by about a month, offers features like booking hotels and buying tickets and is still not fully rolled out to users, often requiring users to join a waitlist.
The rivalry between Meta and Instinct has also extended to social media, with Meta's chief AI officer Alexandr Wang mockingly referring to Instinct as "Insect" and asserting Muse's superior speed and performance.