Instinct is experiencing a crunch.
Users of the buzzy personal AI agent startup, a rival to Meta’s hugely popular Muse, have been reporting a slowdown in the app’s speed at answering questions and completing tasks.
Rex Lowther, an avid Insinct user who runs a nonprofit in Oregon, told Business Insider that he’s experienced “a little slowdown on some tasks.”
“Acts more like a person who might forget to do something,” Lowther said of the app. “Supposed to ping me when an email comes in and it doesn’t for awhile. Like it went home for the night.”
As a smaller startup lacking the immense computing resources of an established company like Meta, Instinct faces a challenge in matching the computing resources AI agents require, Hang Huang, a San Francisco-based founder, said on X.
“Crazy how you can create an awesome product that people love but if your infra struggles to scale it can hurt a ton,” Huang wrote.
Alexey Tumanov, a professor of computer science at Georgia Tech, told Business Insider that because Meta actually owns its compute, it can scale more effectively.
“Owning the datacenter really helps — you have arbitrary scaling control,” he said.
Venture capitalist Vinay Iyengar said on X that he’d used both Instinct and Muse and found them to be “at feature parity.”
Muse, though, has an edge because “it will never have compute outages,” Iyengar wrote, adding that he’s “basically churned from Instinct.”
Instinct didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday.
The app also experienced a slowdown last month. “Some of you may have noticed Instinct’s slower responses over the last 24 hours,” founder Noah Shinn said on X at the time.
Instinct, which predated Muse by about a month, shot onto the scene in August to almost immediate Silicon Valley buzz. The app is free to use, and it depends on investor cash to stay afloat.
It’s still not being fully rolled out to users. If you sign up for the service, you’ll likely be invited to join a waitlist before you get access to the app, which can book hotels, call insurance companies, and buy movie tickets.
The rivalry between Meta and Instinct is also spilling over into social media.
This month, Alexandr Wang, Meta’s chief AI officer, mockingly dubbed Shinn’s startup “Insect” and posted that Muse is much faster — and “hotter.”
Shinn simply responded with a smiley face.
