At just 23 years old, Noah Shinn has already made a name for himself in the AI field.
Last year, he founded the AI assistant startup Instinct. Since then, the company’s valuation has surged rapidly. In August, the company raised $250 million at a $2.5 billion valuation, bringing its total funding to $350 million at the time. This week, the company completed a $1 billion Series C round, pushing its valuation to $10 billion.
Shinn said in a recent episode of the podcast "Invest Like the Best," released on Monday, that although Instinct’s AI assistant is currently only available to a limited number of invited users, Instinct’s annualized trading volume has approached $1 billion.
Shinn told podcast host and venture capitalist Patrick O’Shaughnessy that, despite not being widely open yet, Instinct has achieved organic growth through word of mouth. He said so many people want to join that existing users are now even selling their Instinct invite rights on eBay.
“So far, we’ve spent $0 on marketing,” he said.
What does Instinct do?
Instinct is a free, AI-powered personal assistant that communicates with users via text message or phone call. According to The Wall Street Journal, the assistant launched in February in private beta, and last month became an invite-only beta, with each user receiving five invite slots. Last month, Shinn posted on X that the tool has already gained popularity among some users, who have used it to plan weddings and cancel subscription services worth hundreds of dollars.
The founder of Instinct said that his personal assistant and similar products have the potential to simplify users' lives, especially when traveling—Shinn noted that this category accounts for half of the platform's $1 billion annualized transaction volume—by learning user preferences and storing them in memory.
He said on the podcast: “It will be able to leverage these memories to give you a much smoother experience when booking in the future, fully tailored to your needs.”
Against Meta
Instinct may have raised hundreds of millions of dollars, but an even stronger indicator of the market’s enthusiasm is that the company has caught the attention of Alexandr Wang, Meta’s Chief AI Officer. Since Meta launched its own personal AI agent, Muse, earlier this month, Wang has repeatedly posted jokes about the company on X.
Wang became a billionaire by founding Scale AI, which Meta later invested $14.3 billion in. Wang responded to multiple posts comparing Muse and Instinct. In one, he claimed Muse would defeat Instinct in a mixed martial arts fight; in another, responding to a user who used a meme to compare Instinct and Muse, he wrote: “Muse is way hotter than other individual agents (and much faster too, but mostly just hotter).”
Last week, Wang replied to another post, joking about the name Instinct: “Muse absolutely crushes Insect.” It was reported that Shinn had replied to one of Wang’s posts with a smiley face emoji.
Instinct did not immediately respond to Fortune's request for comment. Meta also did not immediately respond to Fortune's request for comment.
It is currently unclear how many users Instinct has. In contrast, Muse has attracted a large user base and recently surpassed ChatGPT to become the number one free app on the U.S. App Store. According to TechCrunch, citing market intelligence firm Apptopia, Muse reached 2.8 million global installs in its first 12 days since launch.
Shinn told O’Shaughnessy that he believes Muse is a great product, but he “rarely spends time thinking about competition or other players in the space.”
He said that the growth potential remains enormous, as many people, even those using AI, have not yet fully unlocked its potential.
“It’s still an exciting time,” he said.
However, Wang’s post may also have provided Instinct with a marketing boost. The posts related to Instinct collectively garnered hundreds of thousands of views and over 1,000 likes.
Who is Noah Shinn?
Despite the tension between them, Shinn and Wang share a common trait: like many successful tech entrepreneurs, they both dropped out of college.
According to Business Insider, Shinn grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and attended a private high school in San Jose. In high school, he played basketball and participated in cross-country running. He later enrolled at Northeastern University in Boston but left in 2023 to pursue entrepreneurship.
However, Shinn's research on AI agents predates even his dropout.
According to his personal website, Shinn had broad interests during his student years. He worked on type inference and code generation in the Programming Languages Research Group at Tohoku University, studied excited-state molecular dynamics in the Computational Photochemistry Research Group at the same university, and was a member of the avionics team at Tohoku University’s student-run aerospace organization.
But what truly established him as a serious AI researcher was a paper he co-authored during his undergraduate studies with then-MIT professor Ashwin Gopinath, titled “Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learning.” The paper explores how AI agents can learn from past responses by reflecting on feedback and storing data in memory to improve their performance in future interactions.
In a blog post co-written with Gopinath, the two wrote that their approach "maps the way humans solve problems."
According to an article published by the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University, Shinn and his collaborators used their proposed Reflexion method to enable a large language model to improve its accuracy to 91% on a programming evaluation by self-checking its responses, compared to GPT-4’s accuracy of 80%. The paper has been cited hundreds of times, including by Google DeepMind. In 2023, Shinn and his collaborators also presented their findings at the premier AI academic conference, NeurIPS.
In 2023, Shinn also left university to join the AI startup Sierra as one of its earliest employees. Sierra is an enterprise-grade AI intelligence platform that develops AI agents, co-founded by Bret Taylor, Chairman of OpenAI.
Today, Instinct is also developing its own AI personal assistant, directly competing with Muse, which is backed by Meta’s substantial resources. Meanwhile, Shinn stated in a post last month that the company continues to keep Instinct on an invite-only basis because it is “actively scaling up more computing power.”
Shinn’s company may lack the vast resources of Meta, but its rapid rise shows that AI agents are becoming one of the newest battlegrounds in artificial intelligence, with plenty of opportunities still available.