Instinct users say they've noticed a slowdown with the buzzy AI agent

Instinct, the free personal AI agent startup founded by Noah Shinn, is drawing user reports of slower responses and missed tasks as it struggles to match the compute capacity of rival Meta's Muse, Business Insider reported. Instinct user Rex Lowther said the app shows "a little slowdown on some tasks" and behaves "more like a person who might forget to do something," while venture capitalist Vinay Iyengar said he has "basically churned from Instinct" because Muse "will never have compute outages." Georgia Tech computer science professor Alexey Tumanov attributed Meta's scaling advantage to owning its own datacenters, and Instinct, which launched in August and remains waitlisted, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday.

Instinct is experiencing a crunch. Users of the buzzy personal AI agent startup https://www.businessinsider.com/noah-shinn-instinct-ai-competes-meta-muse-2026-9 , 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 https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-agents-travel-plan-europe-trip-muse-instinct-grok-bot-2026-9 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 https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-agents-gone-wrong-horror-stories-instinct-muse-privacy-security-2026-9 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 https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-connect-mark-zuckerberg-muse-mascot-ai-victory-lap-2026-9 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.