Instinct AI assistant raises $1B, Apple smart home hub

Samantha: Welcome to The State of Tech, The European Edition, Tuesday October thirteen, 2026. I'm Samantha Lawrence.

Bob: And I'm Bob Russell. Today: the AI assistant that lives inside your messaging app and just raised a billion dollars; the UK's safety lab gets its hands on the newest frontier models; HCLTech and Anthropic strike a global deal on enterprise AI; Apple opens up its smart home with a new hub, HomePod mini and Apple TV; and to close out, two things you can actually use today, the open-source photo library Ente Photos and the free writing app Ommwriter. Let's start with the assistant everyone in Silicon Valley is suddenly talking about.

Instinct, the AI assistant that lives in iMessage and WhatsApp, quadruples its valuation in a month.

Samantha: So this is the story that got Silicon Valley wide awake this month. Instinct is a personal AI assistant, but there is no app to download. You text it, or send a voice note, through iMessage or WhatsApp, and it just handles things. Planning a trip, doing the groceries, booking tickets, cancelling subscriptions, answering emails, reserving a restaurant. Recently it has also started making phone calls on your behalf and paying for things, and it even gets its own email address so it can create accounts for you.

Bob: And the money around it is almost absurd. According to TechCrunch, late in August the company raised three hundred fifty million dollars at a two and a half billion dollar valuation. One month later, end of September, another one billion dollars came in at a ten billion dollar valuation. That is four times as much, in roughly a month. Backers include Sequoia Capital, Benchmark Capital and Coatue. And the company has not shared any user numbers or growth figures. Investors are backing something the outside world cannot verify.

Samantha: The founder is twenty-three years old, his name is Noah Shinn, and the company is only a young startup. The product is still invitation-only, which of course only makes people want it more. One early user, entrepreneur Christopher Rim, told reporters his Instinct arranged an airport car he had not asked for, and spotted a free perk on his flight he did not know existed. His word was, quote, insane. Veteran investor John Borthwick, who has no stake in Instinct, said it is the first AI assistant he would recommend to his wife and kids, people who are not techies.

Bob: And that is exactly the shift. Instead of yet another app, it is an assistant inside the app you already open twenty times a day. But the downsides are serious. Instinct looks into your mail, your messages, your calendar and your location, and it is unclear how much it stores. The first version of the privacy policy went too far according to TechCrunch and had to be rewritten. When asked which language model is underneath, the assistant answers evasively. And the restaurant platform Resy temporarily blocked one user's account after his Instinct tried to book a table in a New York restaurant two hundred times in an hour.

Samantha: For European listeners that is the real tension. A messaging-based assistant is wonderfully low-friction, but handing a private company this much reach into your inbox and payments is a significant step, especially when the company itself will not say what it keeps. And competition is heating up. Meta's own assistant Muse does much of the same, tied into Instagram, Facebook groups and Marketplace. According to the New York Times, Meta held Muse back for months over safety concerns, until Instinct forced Mark Zuckerberg to push it out. TechCrunch counted dozens of similar messaging-based assistants, including Poke, Tab, Folk and Wajo. A whole new category.

Fridges Turned Up to 50 Degrees: Hackers Hit French Supermarkets

Bob: Okay, this one made me wince a little. Hackers have disrupted refrigeration systems at hundreds of French supermarkets, and the stores ended up throwing away spoiled food. Cybernews says the attackers turned fridges up to fifty degrees Celsius.

Samantha: Fifty degrees. That's not a glitch, that's someone deliberately cooking the contents of a chiller cabinet. Which is a very different kind of attack from the usual "we've locked your files, please pay."

Bob: Exactly, and that's what interests me. Normally we talk about ransomware where the damage is digital. Here the damage is milk, meat, ready meals, stuff you can't un-spoil. It's cyber with a physical consequence.

Samantha: And it lands in a place people don't think about. Shops have all this connected equipment now, the cooling units, the monitoring, the remote controls so a technician doesn't have to drive out at midnight. It's convenient, and it quietly widens the door.

Bob: Right, so the fridge becomes part of the network. And honestly, most of us never think of a fridge as an IT asset. A shop manager sees a fridge, not a device that needs patching and a proper password.

Samantha: Which is the whole problem. Industrial and building systems often get bought once and left alone for years. Nobody owns the security of them, because it falls between the IT team and the facilities team.

Bob: Now, we should be careful here. The reporting I have is thin on who did this or exactly how they got in. We know the effect, hundreds of stores affected, but not the full story behind it.

Samantha: Fair, and I'd rather say that than speculate. What we can say is that the impact is real: waste, lost stock, staff scrambling, and customers finding empty shelves. For a grocery chain, with those margins, that stings.

Bob: And food safety is the other angle. If a fridge quietly drifts warm and nobody notices, that's not only a financial loss, that's a potential health risk if the wrong thing ends up on a shelf.

Samantha: Which is why the monitoring matters as much as the cooling. You want alarms that trigger when temperatures drift, independent of the same system an attacker might be fiddling with.

Bob: So the takeaway for retailers is almost boringly practical. Segment those networks, change default credentials, keep a manual fallback.

Samantha: Boring is good in security. Boring means your dairy aisle survives Tuesday.

Samantha: Quick interruption. If you listen to The State of Tech regularly, hit that like button and subscribe, that way you'll never miss an episode. Okay, moving on.

HCLTech signs a global premier partnership with Anthropic to bring agentic AI into large enterprises.

Bob: HCLTech, the big Indian IT services company, has announced a global premier partnership with Anthropic. The idea is to accelerate so-called agentic AI inside large enterprises, which simply means AI that can carry out multi-step tasks on its own rather than just answering questions. HCLTech's services teams will build industry-specific solutions on top of Anthropic's products, with a stated focus on safety, cybersecurity and governance. Its software arm will embed the same capabilities into its own enterprise products as an Anthropic ISV partner.

Samantha: And the timing is interesting. HCLTech announced this alongside strong second-quarter results, including record deal bookings of three point three billion dollars. So the message to clients is: we are growing, we have cash, and our new default AI partner is Anthropic rather than, say, OpenAI or Google. In the IT services world those alignments matter, because when a bank or an insurer buys a transformation programme, it tends to buy whichever AI the integrator standardises on.

Bob: For European enterprises that is the practical takeaway. If your organisation already works with HCLTech, Claude-based agents are about to become the house option on new projects. The emphasis on governance is not just marketing: European regulators have made it very clear that an agent acting autonomously inside your systems needs an audit trail, clear accountability and human oversight. The companies that work this into their rollouts now will have far less pain later when supervisors come knocking under the AI Act.

Samantha: And zoom out for a second. We now have the big American labs doing deals with the big integrators, which is how enterprise software has always spread. The novelty is the speed. A year ago agentic AI was a demo. Today it is becoming part of multi-year services contracts worth billions.

Apple opens up its smart home with a new hub, HomePod mini and refreshed Apple TV at the Welcome Home event.

Bob: Over to hardware. Apple is holding its Welcome Home event today, and the expected line-up is a new smart home hub, an updated HomePod mini and a refreshed Apple TV. The hub is rumoured to have a touchscreen as a central control point for the home, and there is talk of a dedicated homeOS to tie the ecosystem together. Siri is expected to take a much bigger role, with newer AI features baked in. Apple is also said to be working with LG on compatible accessories like smart door locks and thermostats.

Samantha: And this is a market where Apple has been curiously quiet while Amazon's Echo and Google's Nest spent a decade in people's kitchens. A proper hub with a screen moves Apple from being the phone that controls your home to being the device on the wall that runs it. The big question is openness. Matter, the industry standard that is supposed to let smart devices from different brands talk to each other, has been slow to deliver in practice. If Apple's hub genuinely supports Matter well, European buyers who already own Philips Hue, Ikea or Bosch kit do not have to start over.

Bob: For European listeners that is really the point. Smart homes here are far more mixed than in the US, partly because people hold on to appliances longer and partly because privacy rules push you towards devices that keep data local. An Apple hub with a touchscreen and tighter Siri will appeal to households already deep in iPhones, but the price will matter and so will whether the voice assistant actually works well in languages beyond English.

Samantha: And one more thing to watch. If Apple really does ship a dedicated homeOS, that is a long-term signal. It means the home is no longer an accessory to the iPhone, but a product line of its own, with its own update cycle and its own developer story. That would reshape how European smart-home installers and integrators plan the next five years of their business.

Ente Photos keeps decades of family pictures backed up and private, with end-to-end encryption and no ads.

Bob: To close out, two things worth trying today. First, a photo tool for anyone who has watched their cloud storage bill creep up for years. It is called Ente Photos. It is an open-source photo backup and gallery app, and everything you upload is end-to-end encrypted before it leaves your device. That means the company running the servers cannot look at your pictures. You install the app on your phone, sign up, and your library starts backing up in the background.

Samantha: And what makes it stand out is the privacy model. Your photos are encrypted with keys that only you hold, and the apps are open source, so independent people can inspect how it works. You can use it on iPhone, Android, desktop and in a browser, and there is a free tier, so you can try it with a small part of your library first. Bigger libraries need a paid plan, which is the honest trade-off for a service that does not sell your data or show you ads. Setup is much simpler than running your own server, so this suits anyone who can install an app.

Bob: For European listeners it has an extra appeal. Your encrypted photos are stored in more than one place, including a secure facility in France, so a single outage does not take your memories with it. You can also share albums with family and friends, and the people you share with can view them without being forced into anything complicated. If your Google Photos is bursting and you have been thinking about an alternative, this is an easy weekend experiment. Install the app, back up a few albums, and see how it feels by Sunday evening.

Samantha: And the nice thing is you can start small. Back up one year of pictures first, see how it feels, then move more over. There is no rush, because you can try the free plan before you decide whether it is worth paying for more space.

Ommwriter turns your laptop into a calm, immersive writing room with soft background music and quiet typing sounds.

Bob: And the second thing to try today is for anyone who has a long document to finish and keeps getting pulled into email instead. It is called Ommwriter. It is a minimalist writing app that does one thing well: it hides everything on your screen except your text. No toolbars, no notifications, no sidebar flashing at you. Just a page, a blinking cursor and a quiet backdrop.

Samantha: What makes it different is the atmosphere. You pick a calming background image, choose a soft piece of music, and every key you press makes a gentle, muted sound, a bit like typing in a quiet room. The controls fade away while you write and only return when you move the mouse. Ommwriter is popular with novelists, students and researchers precisely because it refuses to grow into a full office suite. Many users say it is the only writing tool that actually lets them finish long chapters.

Bob: For European listeners the practical details are helpful. Ommwriter comes from a small studio in Spain, it runs on Windows and macOS, and it uses a pay-what-you-want model, so you can try it and decide later what it is worth to you. There is no subscription, and no complicated account to set up. You install it, open it, and you are writing within thirty seconds. If you have been staring at a half-finished report, a thesis chapter or a long email you keep putting off, this is the kind of tool that gets you unstuck in an afternoon.

Samantha: And that is a nice note to end on. One tool to bring your photos home, one tool to help you finish writing something. Both quiet, both simple, both yours.

Samantha: Today we covered: the messaging-based AI assistant Instinct raising a billion dollars with no app of its own; the UK's AI Security Institute testing frontier models like Gemini 4 Argon before release; HCLTech's new global partnership with Anthropic on enterprise agentic AI; Apple's Welcome Home event with a new smart home hub, HomePod mini and Apple TV; and two things to try yourself: the open-source photo library Ente Photos, and the calm writing app Ommwriter.

Bob: Want to know more or react? Visit stateoftech.eu or email us at info@doorzetters.net.

Bob: State of Tech, the tech world in 15 minutes.