Instinct just said it wouldn't do advertising, and immediately started "selecting stores and goods" for users.

Beating AI News Flash: Personal Agent assistant Instinct has launched a new feature called Selections, integrating recommendations from real human experts into personal Agents. The company will partner with local chefs, designers, architects, travel guides, and others, having them curate restaurants, travel routes, and products in their areas of expertise, which Instinct then uses to provide recommendations based on user preferences.

For example, if a user is looking for a restaurant, Instinct can reference a list curated by local chefs; if they want to buy home goods, they can find options that match their style and budget from products recommended by independent designers. Noah Shinn stated that they hope the quality of these recommendations will be significantly higher than ordinary internet searches and other chatbots.

Interestingly, Shinn just explicitly opposed the advertising model in his first public long-form interview. He believes that personal Agents will hold vast amounts of user information, and if brands can pay Agents to persuade users to buy things they originally didn't want, it could easily create conflicts of interest. Instinct plans to let users use it for free, then take a commission from merchants that receive orders through the Agent.

Selections cannot currently be directly classified as advertising. Instinct has not said that merchants can pay to be included in the recommendation list, nor has it disclosed whether these partner experts charge fees.

But if Instinct does eventually make money through transaction commissions, Selections will face a very real question: could what it recommends to you also be tied to how much it can earn? Shinn did not explain this time.