Sometimes I feel like I'm The Architect in The Matrix. You know, the guy in the room full of monitors in Reloaded who seems exasperated to have to explain to Neo that this is not the first Matrix nor is he the first version of 'The One'...
As the hype builds around AI "personal assistants", there's a real sense of deja vu. Basically since the dawn of technology, this has been viewed as the holy grail, certainly for consumer-facing services. From Apple's 'Knowledge Navigator' concept video to Microsoft 'Bob' to Clippy to Cortana to Copilot and everything in between, one day, such technology is just going to do all the tedious tasks for us.
Sadly, that day never comes. Often for a whole host of reasons, but ultimately, the technology simply isn't good enough. While it might be able to execute a demo or two, it quickly breaks at basically every other seam. It doesn't even seem to really matter what the underlying technology is, if it works at all, nothing can scale. Enter AI, the latest iteration of 'The One'.
Once ChatGPT cracked the code on chat-based AI, the talk quickly started shifting to "agents". That is, the prospect that the AI would be able to autonomously do things for you in the very near future. But on the way to this – yet again – inevitability, a more enterprising use case got in the way: coding. While OpenAI was focused on various consumer use cases, Anthropic found product/market fit with Claude Code (and Cursor, to some degree, largely powered by Anthropic's models).
OpenAI didn't seem to realize what a big deal this would be at first – to their credit, seemingly neither did Google! – but if Anthropic's surging business didn't quickly prove it, zooming past OpenAI in valuation certainly did. And that's because coding is both a big market, but also because it seems like Claude Code was the entry point to broader agentic uses. Thus, 'Cowork' was born.
OpenAI quickly reoriented with Codex, while SpaceX bought Cursor (after merging with xAI, of course). Google and Meta are also rushing towards this opportunity. But it seems like it's going to be hard to dislodge those big three in coding specifically. So the talk is now once again shifting back to the original and forever goal: personal assistants. That is, consumer-oriented agents.
This too required a wake up call, in the form of a lobster. When OpenClaw exploded out of the cage – perhaps to the point where Apple was selling out of Mac minis! – it was clear there was something to the notion of personal agents. Of course, that was always clear – again, see the past 50 years or so of computing – but the difference is that the technology may be right this time. May.
While OpenClaw was cool and fun, I quickly pointed out the challenges in getting mass consumer adoption for such projects. Allow myself to quote... myself (because it's a good line, if I do say so myself): "People tend to fall in love with great movements but end up marrying great products."
OpenClaw was a movement, we still needed that great product.
All the powers that be were off to the races again. Meta (smartly) tried to jump ahead by buying Manus. But China had other plans. NVIDIA tried to layer on top of OpenClaw, recognizing the obvious security issues, with 'NemoClaw'. But despite the Jensen Hype Machine out in full force, we were still left searching. Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft all had their talking points ready, if not exactly their products. As did Anthropic and OpenAI.
To their credit, SpaceXAI may have actually been the first of the big players to move here. Their Grok Bot is getting a lot of buzz in beta testing. Still mainly around work-oriented tasks, but it looks and feels awfully consumer-y. And it comes just as a handful of startups, notably Instinct and Town,
[have entered the chat](https://www.newcomer.co/p/amid-personal-assistant-investor?ref=spyglass.org). It took approximately 13 seconds for them both to
[achieve unicorn status](https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/the-latest-viral-ai-assistant-rocketing-across-silicon-valley-abb46276?ref=spyglass.org). Why? Personal assistant AI, baby!
Of the two, Instinct seems to be getting the most love right now, as it's more consumer-focused and thanks to its unique onboarding flow and super proactive nature. That, in turn, has led to some inevitable backlash around security and trust. Regardless, we seem to be in a full-on race once again towards the mythical personal assistant.
Any day now, we should see 'Project Hatch', hatch. That is, Meta's 'OpenClaw for Normies'. Amazon is clearly cooking up something similar, as is Microsoft as they work towards their inevitable "Super App" – seemingly a key ingredient in this race. Apple is on the verge of launching Siri AI – for real this time – with many of these capabilities. And Google has 'Gemini Spark' – because everyone must have some sort of 'Spark' AI product – rolling out in phases. Meanwhile, OpenClaw is back with version 2.0 of their offering, which they promise has learned from the lessons of complicated onboarding and the like.
So the stage is set. But will it actually work this time? Are we really going to get viable personal assistant technology? Products that are actually useful? For certain tasks, I think so. But for many things, it's still hard to see it.
Obviously a lot of it will depend on the underlying technology. The models. While Anthropic and OpenAI maintain their leads in terms of agentic flows, SpaceXAI and Meta are clearly gunning for them with new releases due soon. But the question could ultimately come down to how much it matters to control the whole stack, as it were – the model and the harness – versus having the best harness which can leverage the best models, no matter who they're made by.
This has become more interesting in recent weeks with the surge of Chinese "open" models. While they may not be quite at the frontier, they're close. And they're currently offering such closeness at fractions of the American prices. (Or, of course, given the open weights, you can download the models yourself, if you have machines powerful enough to run them locally.) As things stand right now, there's certainly a case to be made that being model agnostic may be advantageous. And that would point to the startups here standing a chance.
While OpenClaw's founder was already "hackquired", the open source project lives on, though some seem skeptical of how at-arms-length it can actually be from OpenAI given that relationship. Or NVIDIA, given that relationship. But OpenRouter has certainly showcased how you can drive immense value in such an approach. And while they too were acquired, the fact that it's Stripe, a company not directly in the AI model space, seems like a good situation in terms of maintaining a "Switzerland"-like status. On the flip side, OpenAI just terminated their contract with Cursor after the SpaceX deal, showcasing the risk of playing up this agnostic nature. And while Anthropic was quick to note their continued support of Cursor, you may recall when they helped torpedo OpenAI's Windsurf deal by pulling their models...
I point that out because it seems quite likely that Instinct and Town will have offers to sell soon, if they don't already. And depending on the acquirer, it could help or hurt or both (Cursor) their chances of truly winning the space.
There's also the question of if owning even more of the stack will matter. By that I mean, the actual devices on which these services are used. Beyond being able to tailor the models and software to run more efficiently, there's the privacy angle here as well. Obviously, Apple, Google, Samsung, and to some degree Microsoft are best positioned in that world. Though Meta and OpenAI would argue that new devices are needed for these new use cases.
[Is voice the unlock to all of this](https://spyglass.org/gpt-live/)?
It is interesting that seemingly no one has the absolute combination of model (that they [fully control](https://spyglass.org/apple-google-siri-ai/)), harness, and hardware... At least not yet!
Maybe that doesn't matter. There's certainly a case to be made that all that will actually matter in the end is a killer product. Again, a few of the current offerings have interesting elements, but no one has nailed the true "personal assistant" experience. And while you can finally at least squint to see elements of it, it's still hard to see how anyone will in full.
Even if we get comfortable having these agents handle our email, will we ever fully offload say, travel? From research to booking. Certainly the former, but the latter still feels like a minefield of options and edge cases. Also, that's the example that is always cited forever and ever around such technology. But how much does that actually matter to the "average" consumer anyway? How many trips are they really booking in a year? Regardless, that use case does not pass the "toothbrush test".
I keep coming back to the idea that the first killer use cases may be more "fun" in nature. Letting agents do (lightweight) tasks for you that result in absolute delight. Opening up your to-do list and getting more comfortable over time with the technology taking over – again, assuming it can. It will be baby steps, not one big handover.
Is a startup well positioned without the baggage of other products weighing them down? The models protected OpenAI and Anthropic, what's the moat here? Is being 'Switzerland' enough? OpenAI has a strong product delight history. Meta always talks a big game and billions of users – not to mention WhatsApp – but some major trust issues, and they keep missing. Google has all the data – and Gmail! – but also some trust-in-themselves issues. Can Apple actually do it this time? No but seriously.
There's a long way between even just the technology and being a fully trusted and useful personal assistant. And we've been promised such things many times, for decades. There needs to be a killer product and a killer use case. Ideally many, but let's start with one?
To quote The Architect, "Hope, it is the quintessential human delusion, simultaneously the source of your greatest strength, and your greatest weakness."