Noah Shinn's Instinct hits $10 billion valuation in Series C

Noah Shinn's path to Instinct runs through AI research rather than a conventional corporate ladder. As an undergraduate at Northeastern University, he authored the Reflexion paper with then-MIT professor Ashwin Gopinath, work that showed a large language model could reach 91% accuracy on a coding evaluation, compared to 80% with GPT-4, by checking its own responses. That paper was cited hundreds of times, including by Google DeepMind, and was presented at NeurIPS in 2023. He then left university to join Sierra, the enterprise AI platform cofounded by OpenAI chairman Bret Taylor, as one of its first employees.

Instinct's rise has not gone unnoticed by larger rivals. Meta's chief AI officer, Alexandr Wang, has repeatedly poked fun at the startup on X since Meta announced its own personal AI agent, Muse, earlier this month, joking that Muse would win an MMA match and mocking Instinct's name. Those posts collectively drew hundreds of thousands of views and more than 1,000 likes, which may have given Instinct a marketing boost it did not pay for. Shinn has said he spends very little time thinking about competition, describing Muse as a great product.

Instinct is keeping itself invite-only for now while it works on bringing up more compute, and Shinn has framed the moment as one of outsized growth potential because many people are not yet using AI to its fullest. Whether the $10 billion valuation holds may depend less on the rivalry banter than on how quickly Instinct can widen access without diluting the word-of-mouth appeal that got it there.