The Analytics Engineering Podcast
Oct 9, 2026 · 55 min · 11 segments
Personal AI agents hit a tipping point, AI became a top voter issue, and OpenAI shelved GPT-6.1 Astra. Tristan Handy and Jason Ganz break down stories from the past few weeks and what they mean for…
Jason GanzHost
Tristan HandyHost
So one of the things that has been on my mind for a while is when are we going to actually enter the era of the personal agent, right? This is something that I think as soon as agents became a thing, we had the idea of, oh, you're going to have your chief of staff agent that you're going to work with.
It's gonna have access to your personal context, and probably your, your work context.
And this has been one where there's been a couple false starts, and this has been in the realm of early adopters, uh, like myself.
I've had a Claude co-work tab that I w- automation that, that I would run to triage my communications.
But what we've seen over the past few weeks since we've last talked is a pretty clear tipping point that the era of the personal agent, and I'm, I'm using personal here meaning something that you as an individual work with continuously, although I think there are actually very important business applications of your personal agent, uh, enter a tipping point.
And this is now something where people are adopting it, and the major players are lining up behind it.
So let's just do a quick overview of the personal agents that have popped onto the s- the scene.
If you have been talking to anyone on x.com or a tech meetup r- recently, you've probably heard some people talking about Instinct and offering you or asking for an Instinct invite code.
Instinct is a new personal agent startup that popped up, uh, ha- kind of shockingly quickly rose to, I believe, a $10 billion valuation.
And this is something that functions like one continuous stream where you can text it, ask it questions, and have it manage things for you.
The other big one that popped up shortly after Instinct was Muse, developed by Meta Superintelligence Labs.
And I have been kind of shocked by the overwhelmingly positive response to Muse, including from myself personally.
Uh, as you'll recall, Tristan and I booked, uh, our, our dinner in Vegas using the Muse agent.
So one of the things that has been on my mind for a while is when are we going to actually enter the era of the personal agent, right? This is something that I think as soon as agents became a thing, we had the idea of, oh, you're going to have your chief of staff agent that you're going to work with.
It's gonna have access to your personal context, and probably your, your work context.
And this has been one where there's been a couple false starts, and this has been in the realm of early adopters, uh, like myself.
I've had a Claude co-work tab that I w- automation that, that I would run to triage my communications.
But what we've seen over the past few weeks since we've last talked is a pretty clear tipping point that the era of the personal agent, and I'm, I'm using personal here meaning something that you as an individual work with continuously, although I think there are actually very important business applications of your personal agent, uh, enter a tipping point.
And this is now something where people are adopting it, and the major players are lining up behind it.
So let's just do a quick overview of the personal agents that have popped onto the s- the scene.
If you have been talking to anyone on x.com or a tech meetup r- recently, you've probably heard some people talking about Instinct and offering you or asking for an Instinct invite code.
Instinct is a new personal agent startup that popped up, uh, ha- kind of shockingly quickly rose to, I believe, a $10 billion valuation.
And this is something that functions like one continuous stream where you can text it, ask it questions, and have it manage things for you.
The other big one that popped up shortly after Instinct was Muse, developed by Meta Superintelligence Labs.
And I have been kind of shocked by the overwhelmingly positive response to Muse, including from myself personally.
Uh, as you'll recall, Tristan and I booked, uh, our, our dinner in Vegas using the Muse agent.
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