Hark Pro vs Instinct AI: Same Tasks, Clear Winner

0:00It is the quickest, smoothest onboarding experience I think I've ever had. Hark is one of the most beautifully designed apps I have ever used. If I had to pick between the two, if I was forced to only have one of these assistants Hey, it's Andrew and I am running four companies through AI. Um I've been running headphones.com for a decade. I have a venture backed company called Lantern and I have Desk Theory, which you're on right now, and a new brand called Bio Candy. Today I want to go through two of the most popular personal AI assistants or agents uh that

0:36have come out very recently. One is Instinct, which has been out for uh 6 weeks or so, and then uh so Hark came out 2 days ago. It's from um a guy named Brett Adcock, who is quickly starting to look like a a new Elon Musk. He's got a robotics company that's valued at over $50 billion and he's

0:58created Hark, this personally AI agent. And before that, he did a vertical takeoff and landing company called Archer Aviation. And before that, he uh created and sold a company called Vettery. So uh a really incredible entrepreneur and um when I show you Hark, you're going to understand why I'm so excited about this product. So, I've been using Instinct since it came out, so I've got a lot more experience with that and really developed thoughts on it. I've been using Hark for 2 days, so I'm going to give you my early impressions about

1:29Hark and how it compares to Instinct. I'm going to show you some of the cool things you can do with both of them. When I'm thinking about personal agents, um I really look at two things. I look at how easy is this thing for me to use, cuz it's personal, I want it to be frictionless, and then I look at how often does this thing surprise me with how useful it is. So, I've kind of developed baseline expectations for AI, and then when I go and use an agent, it either meets those baseline expectations or it doesn't or it massively exceeds them. And actually both of these,

2:02Instinct and Hark, exceeded have exceeded my expectations for usefulness. So, Instinct, it operates uh over text messages, um just like you're texting someone on iMessage or Android. You get a phone number, you start texting with it, and it's immediately useful. And once you start texting Instinct, it starts to ask you to connect things to it so it has more context and can be more or useful. It is the quickest, smoothest onboarding experience I think I've ever had. Hark, however, is an iOS app. Actually, it's iOS, Android, and web, but I've been interacting with it on iOS, which has uh strengths and weaknesses to it, but mostly strengths. So, I'm going

2:43to start with what I love about Instinct. So, first, as a personal agent, it's incredibly smart and determined. This is when I started to realize, you know, you've got these frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic that are incredibly smart. And Instinct's not running on one of those models, but it feels just as smart for doing the types of tasks that Instinct can do. And it's when I started to realize that the harness that you're using on top of a model matters as much or more than the model itself. So, whatever they're using under the hood here, it's pretty good, but whatever they've um put as as a

3:19harness in the system instructions to make the model effective at completing tasks for you is unreal. So, Instinct is great. Um it's uh I love Instinct because it's so easily accessible because I always have iMessage open and at my fingertips, and I have Instinct as one of my favorites in iMessage, so it's up top. So, whenever I need to do something super quickly, Instinct is the first thing I reach for. For example, if I'm driving somewhere and I want to find like a reasonably priced parking spot nearby, I'll pull out Instinct cuz it's incredibly quick. I can do it while I'm

3:54driving my Tesla and FSD. And uh it'll find a spot for me. It nails that kind of task. If I'm looking for restaurant reservations when I'm already out, I'll pull out Instinct. If I remember that I needed to email some parents of the kids of my flag football team like to remind them of a game or a practice or something, I'll pull out Instinct because I know it nails tasks like that and it's really easy and

4:17frictionless. There's some things I don't like about Instinct, however, and one of them is that when I ask it to do something, I have no idea what's happening under the hood. I can't There's no it's thinking um there's no status or progress bar. It doesn't show or tell me what's going on until it comes back to me with either a question or the thing's done. And sometimes the gaps between asking it to do something and getting the result back can be pretty long. So, I just don't know if there's activity happening, if I need to check in and say like, "Hey, is this still happening? Did you get

4:49stuck?" Did you forget about it? So, that's one thing I I don't love. And I also don't like that it's hard to handle multiple work streams in Instinct because it's one single text thread. So, having one single text thread is super convenient and easy and nice in one way cuz everything's linear and time sequenced and you just have one little text box to to worry about and one stream of messages. That's great. But, if I want to do multiple work streams, you can start a bunch of tasks and then they kind of all start hammering back at you in different sequence and you don't

5:23know what's happening under the hood. So, like it's just pinging you randomly about the different things it's working on. And what can happen is if you start working on a few things at the same time, your tasks get lost in a wall of text and then they're they're hard to find. And maybe you lose a reply or two uh in the wall of text and then forget they're working on something until you scroll up and try to look for it or or So, to me there's some cognitive load attached to just trying to keep things straight when you're working on multiple

5:51things. Um now let's get to Hark and uh what I love and and dislike about Hark. So, it's an app whereas Instinct is something you text with and I mostly interact with Hark through iOS. Hark is one of the most beautifully designed apps I have ever used. If you are a fan of beautiful design, uh you should just download the app and use it just for that just to see the beautiful design choices they've made. Like it's not just that it's beautiful, it's the the UI is

6:23so intuitive, so clean. Uh it's not busy. Like if you view use the Chat GPT app lately where it's this total Frankenstein of a million different things that it's trying to do in this one app, Hark feels like the opposite where it's just purpose-built, it's intuitive, feels beautiful, joyful animations and interactions. It's it's a

6:45real joy to use. Um they also use dynamic interfaces and it's the first application of dynamic interfaces I've seen that is feels seamless. Like it The stuff looks beautiful, fits the content perfectly, and it almost doesn't stand out because of how smooth and beautiful it is. Another thing I like about Hark is how incredibly proactive it is. So, you can see that I've got a a little note here that Saturday's Bengals game, which is my flag football team that I'm coaching, against the Broncos is now at 5:30. So, it moved from Sunday. The same time, Monica's parents night out starts, so my wife has a a date night booked with us

7:27where our kids go to some parents night out thing. Want me to move the game to Saturday on your calendar and work out when you could get there after. So, it's just thoughtful and proactive and it it surprises me with that kind of thing a bunch. If I scroll up here, it asked if it wanted if I wanted it to create a webpage for the flag football parents cuz it noticed

7:50how often I was emailing them. And it was like I can put all this information on one page and it just brought that up to me. I didn't have to ask it to do that. And so I said yes, and then it built this beautiful page. It's got like light and dark mode. This was just a one-shot with announcements, schedule, all kinds of stuff. It is beautiful. Works on mobile

8:11and desktop and actually useful. So that kind of um thoughtful intervention where it goes and looks at all the contacts and then brings truly useful things for you to do that you might not have thought of. Uh it's funny I sent this I sent this website to my wife before sending it to the parents and she was like, "Oh, you

8:30wasted a bunch of time on that." I was like, "No, I like literally wasted zero time on this. Hark asked me if I want to do it and I just said yes and that was it." And it looks like something that I spent a lot of time on, which is which is pretty cool. Um Something else I really love is that Hark has three tabs up top. So it's got home, chat, and projects, which is cool. So home is something that you can

8:55customize. Um I've got widgets that I've added and you can get really creative with those. And then it's got this part of the top where it it recommends tasks uh based on the context in your communication and everything else for it to do. And they're all bang on. They're they're really cool. It's like, "I'm going on a trip on October 15th and I haven't booked flights yet." So it's telling me I should book flights. Uh

9:20bang on. I also have it syncing with a Google Sheet with to-do's so that it can track all my to-do's from uh inbox triages and things like that. So that's super cool that there's a little spot that feels like a home, a little uh activity center or dashboard. So it's more than just chat. Then you've got chat, which is just single threaded inline chat, which is what you have with Instinct. But then it's got this really cool projects tab, and I think this is awesome. So, when I was complaining about the work stream issue with Instinct, like if you're doing a bunch of different things at the same time,

10:00you can get them lost in that single threaded chat. So, projects allows you to keep certain projects in one place and work on them simultaneously, keep the context in one place. You can even give specific instructions for different projects. So, I have an inbox triage project, and I gave it an instruction that every morning at 7:00 it should go and do the triage so that I have a fresh

10:24triage in the morning. I also said, you know, if any person I know emails me, that's something that we should triage because originally it was skipping some some people I know cuz they hadn't actually asked for anything, and I was like, no, I want to see those emails and have an opportunity to reply to them, and it fixed that. And that's an instruction just for that project. So, I love that because, you know, I can work on four or five different projects at a time. It keeps all the context there, and they stay nice and threaded together, and this chat stays clean. So, I actually think this is like the

10:58perfect balance of complexity and simplicity in a UI. It's like it's just as complex as it needs to be, but not a step beyond that, which I really love. Um overall, both Instinct and Hark are excellent, and they're growing super fast. Um I'm actually really proud of what Brett Adcock's been able to achieve here. I I am rooting for him to say both surprised me with how useful they are. I like that Instinct is so frictionless and easy to access and use. I like that Hark has an app and a beautifully designed one at that, that not only is already excellent on day three of it being live, but is a

11:40surface area for them to keep improving this. So So, there we go. Um Hark, incredible, a joy to use. Instinct, great and frictionless. If I had to pick between the two, if I was forced to only have one of these assistants, I would pick Hark um for many reasons, but it's just such an incredible experience to use an app this well designed and the model and harness that they're using are incredible. I love the

12:09proactiveness. And I'm bullish on them being able to continue building a lot more because they have a surface here surface area here that they can build into. Um so I I would bet on Hark continuing to improve really fast. And if the litmus test is like how good is their launch, their launch is incredible. Their their first version is so unreal. It is the best new app I've tried in a really, really long time. Like talking about having magical experiences with apps, like of course there was the ChatGPT moment, there was

12:41Claude code when uh Opus 4.5 came out. But like in terms of really being blown away, I don't remember being blown away this much by an app and this is like a total non sequitur, but since uh Shazam came out in in like 2009, I think it was, 2008, 2009 when you could put your phone up and it would identify a song for you and I would it was just like that this is magic, this is amazing. And that's the feeling I got with this. I don't think I've had that feeling since then. It's a pretty funny example. I actually just just thought of it right

13:11now, but that's how I felt using using Hark. I am I'm so excited about this app and I'm excited to see where it goes. If you like this video, um be sure to like the video and subscribe to my channel. It's brand new. Um getting that kind of feedback gives me the motivation to keep making these. If you have any questions or comments, drop them below and I will be sure to

13:32get back to you. And I'll see you for the next one. Thanks so much.