Instinct's popularity strains computing power, just raised $250 million and now seeking $1 billion more.

Beating AI News Flash: Personal AI assistant Instinct is considering raising another $1 billion. It has just completed a $250 million funding round, bringing its cumulative funding to $350 million. Over the past few weeks, Instinct has repeatedly alerted users that the service is at full capacity and responses may be slower. The new funding round is still at an early stage and may ultimately not happen.

If the full $1 billion is raised, existing investors expect the valuation to reach at least about $10 billion in order to keep dilution for old shareholders within 10%. Instinct currently relies mainly on renting servers and makes extensive use of open-source models. Founder Noah Shinn has also mentioned to potential investors that in the future he hopes to buy chips himself and even operate data centers to reduce computing costs over the long term.

Competition has also suddenly intensified. Meta has just launched the free personal Agent Muse, which can likewise shop for users, book flights, and handle daily tasks. In early community comparisons, multiple testers mentioned that Muse is noticeably faster than Instinct.