Who wins, and why

broadglow

@broadglow · 2026-09-09

Losing on Muse is *existential* for Meta Right now, if you watch and ad on instagram, and buy that product within X days, Meta can often get that last-click attribution and show ROI to their ad-buying customers and then improve targeting What happens when a personal agent makes that purchase via a sandboxed headless browser or an API? Meta loses last-click attribution forever, and their biggest customers are in the dark Agentic commerce is maybe biggest existential tail risk for Meta -- if it becomes a real category, they *have* to win

Harry Stebbings

@HarryStebbings · 2026-09-09

Why Instinct Is Not a Competitor to Town “I don’t think Instinct (@noahrshinn) and Town are trying to do the same thing or monetize the same way. We generate revenue from companies using us for work, with network effects around multiple team members. Their product doesn’t do any of that. I see a strategy that’s more like customer acquisition with a free, fully subsidized product. The harnesses have similar capabilities, but the ICPs and where the marketing is going feel pretty different to me.” @jgreze How do you think about the future of agent to human interaction? How many agents will a single human have… @martinmignot @altcap @scottbelsky @joshm @omooretweets @ankrgyl

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Jeff Morris Jr.

@jmj · 2026-09-09

The most painful consumer experience for the Instinct vs. Muse is creating new vaults & building context from scratch. Some of this is solved by the 1Password product integration on the vault side, but context is still a pain in the butt. Once you set up a personal assistant and build context, switching costs are incredibly painful. You have to be aggressive & win the market now if you're both companies (and all other companies will inevitably compete incl. Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, etc.) Will be the industry defining product war of 2026 as we close the year.

imran

@imranye · 2026-09-09

it’s easy to hate on meta but i think muse has a solid shot at capturing the masses AI already has a bad rep amongst the masses seen as “wasting water and eating books for evil companies” muse seems to trying to challenge that idea ex: these “ideas” they’re not “bots”, not “agents” but just simple ideas ideas that, are themed around: - making your life better - reconnecting with others - becoming healthier - managing your money etc there’s also an idea of “goals” clearly articulating to users that the point of muse is to help you achieve your goals it feels fully featured and ready for mass adoption even if people don’t “trust” zuck with their data, there’s a billion people that use whatsapp, ig, and facebook every day don’t listen to what’s happening in the echo chamber of twitter i think this thing will be massive….

Muse67 likes · 4k viewsRead it

David Pawlan

@DavidPawlan · 2026-09-09

I think Muse chose to not go WhatsApp native first to let early power users find the bugs/build the habits Once they hit a confidence threshold, Muse hits WhatsApp, conquers the world and goes parabolic The native WhatsApp Muse will be 10x better than the Muse we use today, which is wild to think about

Tanmay

@tanmays · 2026-09-09

Muse looks fantastic and equals Instinct in so many ways. All personal assistants will more or less be just as capable as the next. There is no moat anymore, it’s table stakes. The only way to stand out now is user trust & privacy. That’s what Halo is focusing on, ensuring privacy with 100% user data stored locally.

Apoorva Govind

@Appyg99 · 2026-09-09

After 24-ish hours on personal assistants, my take is that if they all do perfectly what they’re expected to do, it’s going to become yet another commodity with no clear differentiation. Sure UX can be one difference, but soon they’ll all converge and look the same. I think the next frontier is going to be group agents. Agents that shape and enhance social behavior. This is going to be the game changer product. Personal agents will exist but not sure they’ll change much. Also given how valuable user data will be, I bet Meta/Google will give it away for free forever

Brycent

@brycent · 2026-09-09

When I said the personal AI assistant market was oversaturated people told me I was wrong. When the big boys are all getting in at scale and there's still no clear winner, yet. Yes there are wayyyy too many. It will be interesting to see who wins. My guess is one of the large players. Excited to test Muse.

Freda Duan

@FredaDuan · 2026-09-09

1/ What is actually different about @openclaw vs. $Instinct / @Muse ? Other than the latter being "OpenClaw for normal people" with no setup required? 2/ What happened to all the Claws people built earlier this year, and why are Instinct/Muse getting traction now? 3/ Why did it take ~6-9 months after @openclaw for this new batch of personal agents to suddently show up? 4/ If GPT/Claude get payments + credentials + better computer use, do they just become the personal agent? A few takes I've heard: - OpenClaw hype faded partly because people went back to $GPT/ $Claude for many daily tasks. Better models >> end-to-end execution. - A lot of productivity Claws - daily podcast summaries, monitoring, etc. - ppl thought would boost productivity, but it's not perfect/ doesn't do a good job. - Better computer use may have crossed a reliability threshold, making agent workflows meaningfully smoother. Curious what others think. [I've used, and still use, most of the agentic products above.]

Alex Kwon

@startupoppa · 2026-09-09

ok instinct founder has pretty god tier taste. also moves lean and fast. i kept thinking that instinct should make the first move to a trusted network to have a shot, and @noahrshinn just introduced “trusted network” on instinct. (cc @joshelman) @Muse and @alexandr_wang @finkd are great, but whoever nails multiplayer will acquire one piece of our lifetime tbh

jason yeh

@jasonoliver · 2026-09-08

Seemed inevitable that meta and Open AI lean into their massive consumer distribution advantage to offer this type of computer use agent product, and since the products themselves aren’t very differentiated or that good right seems like this will drive a ton of adoption/get a lot of people to try

Harry Stebbings

@HarryStebbings · 2026-09-08

To me, Instinct is very similar to Lovable. Lovable started off as a thin wrapper on top of models. It was able to be copied fast. But it wins because of: 1. Speed of execution. 2. Brand. 3. Momentum/fundraising/hires. And over time, the product moves from being easily copied to being immensely feature-rich and deep. Jury is out whether Instinct can do the speed of execution but they have the brand and momentum.

David Pawlan

@DavidPawlan · 2026-09-08

did Muse just nuke Instinct? it has access to your entire insta/fb network, posts you've interacted with, your targeted feeds...that is insane levels of personal context now add in fb marketplace 🤯 plus it's insanely fast, speed is probably the biggest criticism of Instinct i've seen

signüll

@signulll · 2026-09-08

muse has been a genuinely impressive product to play with. it has all of the functionality of the imessage agents in flight today but also has all of the ingredients that will expose it to hundreds of millions including a massive friend graph through insta, increasingly rich context from email & other services which you connect, & more importantly stuff like fb marketplace. marketplace in particular is an incredible distribution wedge. millions of normal people could encounter muse simply cuz an agent helps them find something, negotiate the price, & arrange pickup. pretty good execution here from fb.

Muse993 likes · 62k viewsRead it

Aaron Levie

@levie · 2026-09-08

Personal assistant agents are going to be a very exciting AI category. It’s the first time you can have high token volume agentic use-cases that make sense for consumers. Lots of different approaches emerging right now, and it’s going to be hyper competitive because these agents will mediate a lot of consumer spend over time. But this certainly plays directly to Meta’s strengths: lots of compute required, can monetize with ads and commerce, software focused experiences so can distribute it at scale, and so on.

“Concerns from Instinct over conflicts have knocked Index Ventures out of leading a new round for fellow AI assistant startup Town.”