Hello,

Instinct, the year-old personal AI assistant popular among Silicon Valley tech workers, is running at full capacity—and founder Noah Shinn has told prospective investors he wants to raise as much as $1 billion to help address its compute needs.

The story raises a bigger question: What happens to the economics of consumer AI when growth requires enormous—and increasingly expensive—computing capacity?

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So we asked Deep Research: What does Instinct’s compute crunch tell us about the economics of consumer AI?

Available with The Information Pro, Deep Research lets you investigate questions across more than a decade of The Information’s reporting and proprietary data.

Here’s a taste of what it surfaced:

• AI apps can quickly become infrastructure businesses. Instinct has spent heavily renting AI servers, while Cognition’s rapid growth comes with significant compute costs and cash burn.
• Startups are competing against subsidized compute. Meta’s Muse is entering the same market while giving away expensive AI usage for free.
• The constraint reaches beyond individual startups. AWS has asked engineers to conserve computing resources as demand puts pressure further down the AI stack.

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