Instinct: My AI Assistant

A couple of weeks ago I was sitting with a fellow board member the night before a Board meeting.

We were talking about simulations—AI-powered tools that create digital twins of people who then can be surveyed. I find this topic fascinating (and a bit terrifying), and have mostly been of the view that digital twins, by definition, will tell you the 80% that was easy to find out and leave out the 20% that really matters.

He shared that he thought there was more potential than what I was describing, and told me about a podcast with the founder of Similie.AI that I should listen to. When I asked him to send it to me, he took out his iPhone, opened up text messages, and said: “Send Sasha from our Board the Similie.AI podcast that I listed to the other day.”

And, from that alone, I received the following email:

Subject: Latent Space on Similie

Worth a listen: Latent Space with Joon Sung Park on Simile – building digital twins that simulate how people behave and make decisions, now running tens of millions of simulations for Fortune 100 clients at 85-99% accuracy vs. human focus groups.

Thought of you and 60 Decibels.

https://www.latent.space/p/simile

Even with all my exposure to AI, this felt a bit like magic, so I asked him how he did it and he invited me on to the beta rollout of Instinct, which I’ve been using for the last few weeks.

Instinct is a text-based AI (meaning I use it on iMessages on my iPhone). I suspect the tech behind it is not particularly revolutionary, but the texting interface has changed my daily operating rhythm significantly.

My first step, scary as it was, was to give Instinct access to my Gmail, calendar, and Google Drive. Then I started texting with it.

It became clear that it could fill a gap as a very, very useful personal assistant.

Here are a bunch of actual texts that I’ve sent to Instinct in the last week:

• Mark my calendar as OOO (so busy for scheduling purposes) Mon to thurs next week for my trip to Europe. Decline all my internal meetings for next week besides Friday.
• I need to remember to keep or cancel my Amsterdam Airbnb by sunday but remind me midday Friday
• What is [Name] phone number, he’s been slow to reply on email so if I don’t hear back by tomorrow I’ll text him. Remind me.
• What’s the latest on our conversation with [client] about [topic]?
• Email [Name] telling him I sent the payment asking him to confirm
• And let’s keep track of this I need to talk to [NAME] to figure out what time works, but if you’re able to see about wed afternoon that’d be great if not, I’ll do it
• What happened with [name] who I spoke to last week? I feel like I need to nudge her
• Remind me Thursday to write a blog post about using Instinct (!!)

What’s been interesting is that, despite the tech being “simple” (for today’s LLMs), the form factor radically changes how I use Instinct, specifically:

• A texting bot is just different than opening up the Claude app (I suspect this is 100% behavioral on my part)
• Speed of responses is high, so I use it for a different set of things
• I cannot help but personify it a bit—I didn’t realize, when I downloaded it, that my use case was going to be “personal assistant” but that happened quickly and naturally

My main use case is:

1. Have a thought about something I’d like to do (work or non-work related)
2. Send a text to Instinct
3. It gets it 95% done and asks me to confirm it can go ahead and take the action

The net result of this is that thoughts that occur to me quickly (and fleetingly) get taken care of with almost zero effort, meaning many fewer things get put off.

When a bunch of low-but-not-zero-effort tasks become, essentially, zero effort—accept those 5 meeting invitations; tell me all the email I’ve gotten today that looks like spam and clear them out; check on the status of X—the effect is to (1) Lift some load from me; and (2) Get a lot of small tasks taken care of; (3) More space is freed up for more meaningful things.

All of that, together, creates a surprising amount of leverage.

Instinct is still in Beta but I have some invites—if you’re really interested give me a shout.