Instinct took Silicon Valley by storm. Meet the 'brilliant' 23-year-old college dropout who started it.

Rebecca Zisser/BI Instinct took Silicon Valley by storm. Meet the 'brilliant' 23-year-old college dropout who started it. Rebecca Zisser/BI Noah Shinn was publishing influential AI research before he graduated from college. Now, at the ripe age of 23, he's taking on Mark Zuckerberg.Shinn's invite-only AI assistant, Instinct, seemingly came out of nowhere this summer, went viral among Silicon Valley insiders, and raised $250 million at a whopping $2.5 billion valuation.Its breakout has turned the college dropout into one of AI's hottest young founders and put his tiny startup in direct competition with another company started by a college dropout: Meta.Noah Shinn dropped out of Northeastern University in 2023 and quietly developed a reputation as something of an AI wunderkind.He's been publishing high-level research papers on AI agents — exactly what Instinct does — since he was an undergrad, when he stood out to his professors for his drive and independence. He also has a competitive streak from his days as an avid basketball player, to reportedly getting his investors to stop backing a rival startup.Instinct's rapid rise captures a new phase of the AI race. After years of competing over which company could build the smartest chatbot, the battle is shifting toward assistants that can actually get things done, such as booking hotels, scheduling meetings, and handling everyday errands with minimal prompting.Meta and other tech giants have enormous advantages in money, computing power, and distribution. Shinn's unlikely ascent shows how quickly a small startup with the right product can still compete against Big Tech.Shinn didn't respond to interview requests. A spokesperson for Instinct confirmed several biographical details.The undergrad behind a pioneering AI paperWeeks after the November 2022 launch of ChatGPT, Shinn — then a Northeastern undergraduate — answered a LinkedIn post from MIT professor Ashwin Gopinath, who was looking for students to tinker with the new technology over the holidays.Gopinath said he was "kind of bored" over Christmas and had an idea. Over the next three months, Gopinath, Shinn, and four others wrote a paper that discussed ways to make AI agents — then a nascent technology — better at learning from their mistakes.The paper's core idea was that an agent can improve by remembering its prior failures, and Gopinath, who went on to found his own AI startup, Sentra, now thinks that Instinct's magic could come from a similar approach.The paper, which was presented at NeurIPS, one of the world's most prestigious AI conferences, laid out a fundamental technique called Reflexion that AI agents use to learn from interactions with the outside world."Many people have since reinvented it, but the basic technique is in a paper that a second-year college student wrote in 2023, before GPT-4," Arjun Guha, one of Shinn's Northeastern computer science professors, told Business Insider."Virtually zero students can write research papers as undergrads. Even fewer can do it without any assistance," Guha said.Another Northeastern computer science professor, Steven Holtzen, told Business Insider that he recalled Shinn as a quiet student who preferred listening to speaking out. He described Shinn as highly attentive, sending late-night emails full of detailed questions.In a letter of recommendation, he wrote that Shinn has "immense drive and independence, capable of identifying and executing on research questions on his own with little supervision."Noah Shinn's journey from Sierra to InstinctShinn dropped out of Northeastern in 2023 to become one of the first employees at AI startup Sierra, an Instinct spokesperson said.Based in San Francisco, Sierra builds customer support agents and is led by OpenAI chairman Bret Taylor. Shinn worked as an AI researcher across most of Sierra's core products, earning high praise from Taylor himself."Noah is an incredible engineer and entrepreneur, and I am so grateful I had the opportunity to work with him," Taylor told Business Insider.Shinn continued to coauthor AI papers focused on improving agents' ability to follow instructions, use tools, and code. In September 2025, he left Sierra to work on Instinct, which soft-launched in the summer.With a bare-bones website and no launch video, Instinct bucked a trend of startups launching with flashy, polished clips.He made it invite-only to venture capitalists early — a "brilliant" idea, says Trace Cohen, the cofounder of Six Point Ventures. VCs began bragging on social media about the cool new AI agent doing their work for them."In all the group chats you see people saying, 'I just used this new technology — OMG,'" he said."Everyone is just hounding each other for access."On August 26, Shinn posted on X — for the first time — about how thrilled he was with everything early users were doing with Instinct, from buying groceries to canceling subscriptions. That day, Shinn announced that his company had secured $250 million in funding at a $2.5 billion valuation, on top of another $100 million he had previously raised.As investors clamored for a piece of the startup, another side of Shinn showed: an aggressive, competitive streak that's a hallmark of Silicon Valley.Shinn, a high school athlete who was remembered as a "tough" basketball player by one of his college classmates online, had heard that two of his biggest investors were funding a rival Andreessen Horowitz-backed agent startup, Town.After he complained, Index Ventures and Conviction abruptly pulled their funding, according to a report from Upstarts Media.The Instinct spokesperson said the company is "unable to confirm the opinions of others."Conviction, Index Ventures, and Town's CEO Jean-Denis Greze didn't respond to requests for comment on the report.Instinct's growing rivalry with MetaThough Instinct has grown quickly, it now has a far bigger rival: Meta. Zuckerberg, the tech giant's CEO, pledged to build a "personal superintelligence" last year, and the project became known internally as Hatch, a personal assistant that could help people do things like buy groceries, Business Insider reported.Meta launched its AI agent, Muse, weeks after Instinct, and it caught on quickly, soon rising to the top of the app store. In a Threads post, Zuckerberg said that Meta had been holding Muse back due to concerns about AI safety and security.That was also based on more practical concerns, such as ensuring Muse actually followed user' instructions and didn't, for example, buy products without users' permission, a person familiar with the matter told Business Insider.The tech giant does have one key advantage: enormous amounts of computing power and cash that can keep its product running smoothly. Instinct, which is free and sometimes has significant lag due to high demand, depends on investor cash. Instinct is in talks to raise at a $10 billion valuation, according to a report from The Information.Muse and Instinct are now vying for AI assistant supremacy. While the ultimate winner of this race is unclear, Instinct has already proven that the next great AI assistant doesn't have to come from Big Tech.That hasn't stopped Meta from taking notice. Its AI chief, Alexandr Wang, has mockingly dubbed Shinn's startup "Insect" and posted that Muse is much faster — and "hotter." Shinn responded with a smiley face.Have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at crollet@businessinsider.com or on Signal and WhatsApp at 628-282-2811. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely. AI assistants Silicon Valley Tech More AI Startups Entrepreneurship Generative AI College Most popular Business Insider tells the stories you want to know about the world of business, technology, and finance Business Insider tells the stories you want to know about the world of business, technology, and finance Business Insider tells the stories you want to know about the world of business, technology, and finance Business Insider tells the stories you want to know about the world of business, technology, and finance Business Insider tells the stories you want to know about the world of business, technology, and finance Business Insider tells the stories you want to know about the world of business, technology, and finance Charles Rollet is Business Insider's tech correspondent in San Francisco, where he focuses on breaking major news about the AI industry. In 2025, he led an investigation which revealed that Scale AI had inadvertently exposed confidential data about its workers and clients. In 2026, he was the first to break the news that Meta had halted a controversial keystroke tracking program.Prior to joining BI, Charles worked at TechCrunch covering startups and VC in San Francisco. Before that, he was based in Southeast Asia for a decade, where his work won a Gerald Loeb award and was nominated for a Society of Publishers in Asia award. His reporting on the surveillance industry led to US human rights sanctions on five Chinese security camera manufacturers.Charles is especially interested in how frontier AI models are built and trained. He has a master's degree in business reporting from NYU and a bachelor's degree in history from Northwestern.You can contact Charles securely on Signal at charlesrollet.12 or +1-628-282-2811. Charles keeps sources anonymous. Please use a non-work device to reach out. Pranav Dixit is the Meta Correspondent at Business Insider based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He writes about Meta’s products, policies, and internal workings while examining how the company’s decisions shape how billions of people connect and communicate.Previously, Pranav was the India-based technology correspondent for BuzzFeed News, covering the impact of Silicon Valley’s largest companies on the culture, society, and politics of more than a billion people in South Asia. He has also been a senior news editor at Engadget and ran technology coverage at the Hindustan Times, one of India’s largest national newspapers.Pranav’s reporting has shed light on the human consequences of Big Tech’s quest for growth in emerging markets, and sparked widespread conversations about the impact of American technology companies on the Global South. In 2019, he won Syracuse University’s Mirror Award for a boots-on-the-ground feature about how WhatsApp misinformation sparked gruesome lynchings in rural India. He has also reported from Kashmir, a volatile geopolitical hotspot, documenting the world’s longest-running internet shutdown.His work has been widely cited by major national and international publications, and he has been featured on the BBC, Al Jazeera, and podcasts such as Vox Media’s Land of the Giants to discuss his work. He has also spoken in journalism classes including at UC Berkeley’s graduate journalism program. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Vox, Time, The Information, and Al Jazeera.Pranav moved to the United States in 2021 from New Delhi, India, to be a fellow at Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism, where he studied the evolution of the American tech press and ways newsrooms around the world can cover technology and society more effectively.Got a tip about Meta or anything else in Silicon Valley? Contact Pranav via encrypted messaging app Signal (+1408-905-9124), or email him at pdixit@insider.com or pranavdixit@protonmail.com. You can also reach him on WhatsApp at +857-753-3949 or DM him on X (@PranavDixit) or BlueSky (@pranavdixit.bsky.social).Pranav keeps sources anonymous. Please use a non-work device to reach out.Expertise: Meta, Facebook, WhatsApp, Llama, AI, Threads, Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg, social media, platforms, immigration