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Two new AI assistants have Silicon Valley buzzing

Instinct and Grok Bot offer glimpses at where AI is going. Also: Stripe calls the singularity, Nvidia’s strange deal, and dead companies are being mined for training data.

Alex Heath's avatar
Alex Heath
Aug 21, 2026
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My social feeds have recently been dominated by buzz for two new AI products: Elon Musk’s Grok Bot and an invite-only, text-based AI assistant called Instinct.

While the latter has yet to officially emerge from stealth, the rumor circulating is that Instinct’s small team, which includes an early Sierra researcher named Noah Shinn, is currently raising a Series A round of funding to buy more compute and open its waitlist. Like Poke before it, which was recently sold to Cognition, Instinct seems to be orchestrating off-the-shelf models with some specialized fine-tuning and tool use. It’s unusually capable and proactive at web-related tasks. There are a lot of little nice touches that help onboard a user more quickly, like the agent automatically researching your background while you’re setting it up. Early user takeaways often describe it as “OpenClaw for normal people.”

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