Good morning! Since we last spoke, we passed 200K subscribers on YouTube! Of course, now I’m wondering how many of those subscribers are AI agents. Or perhaps your AI agents.
Yes, we’re talking (again!) about always-on, always-working AI—including OpenAI’s Dot, Meta’s Muse and Instinct’s…Instinct.
Then, Bose brings back wired headphones, America.gov makes some bold promises and a LOLz Pro Max because apparently everyone on the internet is funny this week.
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I have three always-on, always-grinding AI assistants working for me right now. What can I say? I’m a great boss.
You all know about Thingy, my orange-egged Meta Muse. But now I’ve thrown in Instinct, an always-on (and so far invite-only) agent that lives in iMessage. The buzzy startup behind it has raised $1 billion and is valued at $10 billion. And as of yesterday, I’ve got OpenAI’s new Dot, which I’ve named DotThing and given an orange face and monocle.
Underneath the cute faces—or, in Instinct’s case, standard-looking text messages—they work pretty much the same way. Each gets a virtual computer in its maker’s cloud, where it can keep working even when I’m not around. I can ask them to monitor the news, make appointments, buy things for me—good old assistant stuff.
After bouncing among the three, I’m increasingly convinced that the AI model underneath may be the least interesting part of this new race.
We’ve spent the past few years obsessing over which model is smartest. That’s how a lot of us ended up choosing ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini. (Google has a similar always-on agent called Gemini Spark, but it’s simply not in this race. It doesn’t have the polish or utility of the others yet.)
But with always-on agents, the competition is moving up a layer: What does this thing feel like to talk to? Does it connect to the tools and apps you use? And, most importantly, do you trust it enough to hand over the stuff that makes it genuinely useful? Some thoughts on how to decide what to use below.
Fun fact: In 2020 Apple launched the iPhone 12—the first iPhone to come without headphones and a charging brick in the box. The corresponding reduction in box size allowed 70% more iPhones to fit on a shipping pallet, according to CNBC.
This newsletter was written and curated by Joanna Stern and Adele Lowitz.
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