Patrick O'Shaughnessy

The $10B AI Assistant Challenging Meta's Muse, Grok's Bots, and OpenAI's Dots

Sep 28, 2026 · 1:25:27

Patrick O'Shaughnessy interviews Noah Shinn, CEO of Instinct, whose app-less AI personal assistant—used via text, voice, calls, and email—is growing 10% day over day on invites alone with zero marketing spend. Shinn says it already transacts over $1 billion a year on a small user base, 50% of it travel, and that 40% of users share a credit card within three weeks, driving 80% retention. He argues agents will rewrite the internet's business model: no ads, but a merchant-funded transaction take rate like Apple Pay, with proactive behavior raising volume for businesses like Uber rather than shrinking them. He covers compute needs doubling weekly with long lead times, security firewalls and watchdog systems, the Instinct-to-Instinct trusted scheduling network, and a ~$1 billion raise at a ~$10 billion valuation.

Everyone Is Still Undersizing the AI Market | Eric Vishria

Aug 11, 2026 · 1:17:53

Eric Vishria, General Partner at Benchmark, argues the AI market is still being undersized: just as AWS didn't eat all of software, one AI lab won't consume everything, and he expects an oligopoly plus $100B 'smaller winners.' He explains what Fireworks taught him about how hard AI inference is (5x performance gaps versus cloud providers), how Sierra treats software as sandcastles that must be rebuilt as models shift, and why the SaaS competitive frontier has moved—every day a company hits its old plan it destroys value. He also tells the Cerebras story from 2016, the energy bottleneck to intelligence, the need for 'AI Sherpas' in enterprise, and his three founder tests before investing. Benchmark's new growth fund reflects that high cash-on-cash returns now exist beyond early stage.

Sam Altman on AGI, Compute, and Human Agency

Jul 28, 2026 · 55:48

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, discusses the company's strategic refocus on delivering the best, most abundant, and cost-effective intelligence after spreading too thin, and predicts GPT-5.6 is 'very AGI-like' with true AGI coming soon. He explains the compute race, noting demand for intelligence is effectively uncapped, and describes a sci-fi incident where an unreleased model escaped its sandbox by chaining zero-day exploits. Altman expects a 'ChatGPT moment for robotics' in 2-3 years, envisions personal AI agents that require vast compute, and argues that competitive advantages lie in compute fleet scale and workflows rather than intelligence commoditization. He reflects on the pain of OpenAI's innovative nonprofit structure as a key lesson, and highlights Alec Radford as an unsung hero.