Dots: Always-on agents (openai.com)

401 pointsby alvis5 hours ago306 comments

aditya_rs an hour ago

I feel like a lot of these always on agents tie users deeply into the platform. Unlike models that you can swap between with relative ease, with an agent because of the integrations to other platforms, work history and so on it would be harder to switch, since in effect they are essentially your computer on the cloud.

Tin foil hat version of me thinks that all the closed model companies want to desperately build an abstraction layer on top of the model, so that they can limit access to the model directly and build a locked down relationship with the user.

Other inference providers should counter this by providing their own version of standardized managed agents.

Coincidentally, I published a note on my blog just about this today https://aditya.rs/blog/2026/09/29/inference-providers-should...

leokennis an hour ago

Very true. I have ChatGPT set up to do some recurring tasks (keeping track of developments on a policy proposal in politics; on a weekly basis tracking music releases based on my evolving tastes; checking new book releases; basically doing recurring deep dive web research on my behalf and reporting when there is a significant new finding) and this alone keeps me from switching to another service.

The AI itself is quickly becoming a commodity. The ecosystem is what will keep people tied to one of the companies.

reachableceo an hour ago

I mean it’s not exactly tin foil hat. I suspect when we see the s1 drop for these companies , the business plan will be essentially exactly what you just said.

OpenWebUI has allowed me to avoid this. Combined with OpenTerminal.

I am using zcode with GLM5.3 flash from z.ai due to the extra usage / air drops etc . However nothing I’m doing is tied to that harness.

When I moved from crush to Zcode , the first thing I did was tell Zcode to migrate all of my crush customizations to Zcode and to set things up in a harness agnostic way going forward. It did.

So the harness specific setup is just symbolic links to the canonical .md file in various git repos. Also the heavy use of redmine / discourse / GLPI (via small go CLi wrappers that crush and Zcode made for me ) allows me to remain context / chat agnostic as well.

lxgr an hour ago

> When I moved from crush to Zcode , the first thing I did was tell Zcode to migrate all of my crush customizations to Zcode and to set things up in a harness agnostic way going forward. It did.

This works for hosted mass-market solutions just as well! ChatGPT and Claude allow me to download all of my data, and these days data formats are less of a moat than ever given that you can just hand them to an LLM and have that worry about importing it into your new thing for you.

I've even seen explicit "offboarding prompts" to hand to your old agent, e.g. in Meta Muse.

lxgr an hour ago

It feels like the opposite to me. Moving providers with my Linux VM is incredibly annoying, but with these things, I can (so far) literally ask them to create me a tarball with a README.md and hand it to an agent on the new provider and have it do the rest.

aditya_rs an hour ago

Possibly so for now. But do you think the providers are interested in making interoperability easy?

Even in the future if they are required by law to provide it, I wouldn't bet against the craftiness of the providers to invent some sort of network effect dark pattern to make it painful, if not outright impossible.

Just as an example, with Muse I can already see that the way they are thinking of making money is via taking a transaction cut, so it's not that hard to imagine that Meta can negotiate deals for txns that happens through Muse which won't be available elsewhere.

lxgr 32 minutes ago

Obviously I don't expect them to intentionally help me move to the competition, but I do wonder whether obscure data formats as a moat are a thing of the past.

Your second point is where I'd imagine the future moats to live: Exclusivity deals with service providers. Things are already in motion with Amazon banning and Shopify explicitly inviting Muse; we'll probably see much more of that.

2001zhaozhao 44 minutes ago

Lock-in is easy with these agents because they NEED all of your data to be useful, and they will continue to learn internally about you.

But ultimately the AI company CAN choose to just make all the data exportable and open source their product for self-hosting. (The mainstream ones won't, of course, they want to lock you in and hide their AI prompts and algorithms.)

I think what is sorely needed is a version of Dots/Muse without lock-in risk but is still accessible to regular people unlike Openclaw.

aditya_rs 38 minutes ago

Yep, that's what I think and wrote on my blog. My hope is that the inference providers should provide a managed service like it. It's also in their best interest to do so, because if they don't and these provider hosted agents become the norm, demand for independent inference would drop.

2001zhaozhao 34 minutes ago

> It's also in their best interest to do so, because if they don't and these provider hosted agents become the norm, demand for independent inference would drop.

I disagree with this part. AI companies will want to try their damndest to control distribution of AI, so that they can enshittify later.

Consumers conscious of this will want an alternative, of course. Might be niche similar to how Kagi is in search because big tech will always have a AI inference cost advantage + making users the product (extra $ from ads & purchase cuts) + the good old strategy of dumping.

alpineman 18 minutes ago

I mean OpenClaw being acquired by 'Open'AI says it all doesn't it?

johnfahey 4 hours ago

OpenAI won a lot of good favor for the generous Codex subscription and the efficiency of their models, but now that many people have switched over from Claude, they think they can leverage their position to peddle a stream of unnecessary products, and crack down on the generous limits[1] that brought everyone to Codex in the first place.

Anthropic did the same thing. Earlier this year, Claude subs and Claude Code took off because of the subscription's incredible capability and value, then once they gained enough users, they started focusing on unnecessary products no one asked for (see Claude in Slack), and eventually lost their lead. After losing a bunch of customers to Codex subs they realized their mistake, and now they're shipping again.

AI companies are bad at making software; they are good at making AI models. And that's about it.

[1] https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2104823812042940713

woah 4 hours ago

The bitter lesson

bigwheels 4 hours ago

The Bitter Lesson is significantly more interesting than watching researcher companies cosplay at ...whatever you call what they're claiming to be doing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitter_lesson

teej 4 hours ago

They're just trying things. It's not a conspiracy to "distract" anyone.

johnfahey 4 hours ago

I don't think it's a conspiracy, they're just making the same mistake many other software companies have in the past. When you sell your products to the most discerning and well-informed consumers, you enter into a cutthroat race to the bottom. OpenAI would like to diversify to more profitable ventures, but since ChatGPT they have yet to release something novel that was truly successful, nonetheless profitable, and thusfar nearly every experiment has been a flop, so to speak (ChatGPT Atlas, the Sora App, Instant Checkout, etc).

torginus 4 hours ago

Nerds suck. They are smelly, have bad posture, manners, never leave their rooms and are generally unappealing.

They also have a nasty habit of being aware of nefarious practices, will resist all attempts to and harvest their data, or lock them into your service, and will drop you if your competitor makes a 3% better product, and will reject every upsell for actually profitable services.

Plus there is only so many of them.

i_love_retros 3 hours ago

> They also have a nasty habit of being aware of nefarious practices, will resist all attempts to and harvest their data

Lol what? Most of the hackernews gang consider themselves nerds and they lap this shit up! Every new overpriced and unnecessary product that gets released by google, meta, openai, anthropic, whoever, they lap it up!

Larrikin 3 hours ago

The usage of Chrome and even worse nitpicking of Firefox is such a strange thing about this community.

godelski 3 hours ago

Is everyone here actually a nerd? Or do they just work in tech. You might think they're the same but plenty of people wouldn't. There's certainly different types of nerds

wolvoleo 3 hours ago

Not really. I use cloud AI a bit for development but I don't put personal data in it. That only runs on my local systems.

I also swap all the time for whoever is cheapest

panarky 3 hours ago

A wave of nausea hit when I first saw the warm, fuzzy, cutesy, kawaii, Teletubby-like avatar that Meta gave its Muse agent.

And now OpenAI has done the same thing with their fuzzy, friendly, colorful dots.

I am physically sick.

waynecochran 3 hours ago

Yes, it is hard, psychologically, to grant trust to some silly perverse little thing I want crush like a surreal cartoonish cockroach.

phoghed 3 hours ago

Physically cringed at this comment

bpavuk 3 hours ago

I miss o3 in that regard. if GPT-4o led people into virtual romance and over-validation, o3 gave me the same sort of "madness" but with work.

when I tried GPT-5, I was sad mostly because GPT-5 had some added wordiness. fluff, if you will. o3, though, is a black hole you can talk to, and it only gave information back if there was something to give back. that kind of vibe is my dream coworker

alexgoodhart 9 minutes ago

I miss o1-pro :/

john_strinlai 3 hours ago

im crying and throwing up everywhere. everything i use must be brutalist.

even seeing the linux penguin makes me want to punch my monitor and commit sudoku

laserlight 2 hours ago

> commit sudoku

Hilarious.

derefr an hour ago

I think you missed the point. Things should look like what they are.

The Linux kernel is ultimately a friendly open-source project. There's no harm in it being marketed using a cartoon penguin.

These AI services, meanwhile, are the dangled lights on the heads of data-hungry environment-threatening job-killing leviathantine anglerfish.

Making the dangled light present as non-threatening is not a good thing for society, no matter how much you may personally like pretty lights.

panarky an hour ago

Imagine 2001: A Space Odyssey with Meta's "Jolly" avatar as HAL instead of a blinking red camera lens.

So much more terrifying for a cute, round, fuzzy, friendly, rosy-cheeked plushie trying to exterminate the crew.

aquariusDue 19 minutes ago

The one time a similar mascot to FreeBSD's would've made sense.

Anon1096 2 hours ago

Absolutely ridiculous comment can't believe anyone would actually post this seriously.

giancarlostoro 2 hours ago

> habit of being aware of nefarious practices

Not all Nerds are the same. I've been attacked for questioning why some companies still use Oracle, when most of the ones I've worked at either migrated off Oracle or were in the process of doing so.

dpoloncsak an hour ago

Everyone gets 'got' once

dpoloncsak 2 hours ago

I remember a while ago the discussion kinda steered from "The leading LLM provider will be the one with the better model" to "...will be the one with more user history".

Tools like OpenClaw and Pi seem to remove that from the equation, letting you keep your 'history' and customization while using whatever inference provider you want. If Muse takes off, which seems to be built upon or atleast arch'd similar to OpenClaw, I think we'll see the rise of on-device harnesses.

This would further the efforts to "resist all attempts to.... lock them into your service, and will drop you if your competitor makes a 3% better product, and will reject every upsell for actually profitable services.", imo. In a model-agnostic harness all you care about is speed, accuracy, and price.

CodingJeebus 4 hours ago

The generous subscriptions are wildly unprofitable and both companies are just throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks, it's that simple.

Larrikin 3 hours ago

Did Claude actually lose the lead? They definitely lost a lot of good will but the only people I hear talking about actually switching away are people on message boards. Hermes/Openclaw users did as well but it was always reluctantly to something worse. At work it's still very much Claude first and only sometimes others if Claude fails, which is increasingly less often

drschwabe 3 hours ago

They've definitely lost many experienced devs who can see Anthropic's offerings are insuperior to OpenAI/Codex; I know I am not the only one.

hungryhobbit 3 hours ago

insuperior?

stopthe 2 hours ago

double-plus-ungood

Larrikin an hour ago

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Insuperior

ibejoeb 3 hours ago

I think it's pretty subjective if you mean "lead" to be capability and not raw number of users. I jumped back and forth quite a bit last year because there were some pretty major shortcoming in both. Now they're both quite reliable without too much hand-holding. Codex now consistently works better for the kind of work I'm doing, and it's good enough that I'm not inclined to go to claude, because I don't have any significant problems.

Aurornis 3 hours ago

The people who switch back and forth between providers every month are a very small, but loud, minority.

OpenAI did pull ahead in limits and quality for a while. Anthropic took it back with the Opus 5.5 rollout. I maintain subscriptions to both providers and use both daily. I can confirm these differences were real, not "it's just vibes and nobody knows anything".

I would bet that 99% of each company's paying customers either did not notice, or did not care enough to consider changing.

KronisLV 3 hours ago

> the only people I hear talking about actually switching away

Opus 5 had really bad writing so I switched to OpenAI, though Opus 5.5 largely addresses that and it's not like them building some Slack integrations (or any other non-core stuff) halts the actual model training in any capacity. For what it's worth, Astra is a pretty good model and for all I know the new Sol will be as well, it's just that it's getting more expensive.

an0malous 3 hours ago

This is the standard VC enshittification playbook, people predicted this years ago. You subsidize prices with funding until you establish a monopoly, then you raise them as high as your customers can afford. It’ll continue to get worse from here.

fidotron 3 hours ago

We should be grateful there are at least two serious competitors, and hope for more. (Come on Europe/Mistral, please do something interesting . . . )

If ever the competition reduced it would turn into an absolute shitfest of nonsense very very fast, and that is a prime reason not to allow them to "pace the frontier".

A_D_E_P_T 3 hours ago

> Come on Europe/Mistral, please do something interesting . . .

lol. At this point, they're miles behind home-appliance-manufacturer Xiaomi.

(Admittedly Mimo v2.6 is legitimately quite good, and really pushing the frontier in certain respects. For e.g., it's the only music generation model that actually listens to instructions.)

landl0rd 2 hours ago

Don't know why this is grayed out... europe does not matter for AI. Nobody thinks or cares about them. Mistral makes some good OCR models but that's it. Nobody is making products primarily for the euro market and euros make nothing even equivalent to months old cheap chinese models. Europe is completely irrelevant.

FrustratedMonky 3 hours ago

Codex is for a small software/programming market.

To survive they need to capture different wide population markets. Can't really fault that logic. The whole point of "SI", is general purpose right? So that would imply being used by multiple markets with multiple products.

makerofthings 3 hours ago

> AI companies are bad at making software

They should try using agents. I hear they can write great software.

hungryhobbit 3 hours ago

> unnecessary products no one asked for (see Claude in Slack),

Hey, I never asked for it, but Slack Claude (ie. Claude Tag) has actually turned out to be a useful tool for a few things.

bilalq 2 hours ago

Claude Tag could actually be really useful. Unfortunately, it's too much of a black hole for money. I tried adding it to incident channels, but if a channel gets left open for a few days, Claude will find ways to burn tokens waking up with empty prompt caches and doing nothing. $400 burned by Sonnet 5 on a single incident created because some alarms were oversensitive and didn't distinguish faults from errors. And I still had to prompt it like 5 times to get it to adjust metrics and tweak alarms correctly. Absolutely insane for a change that I could've made as a human in 10 minutes or had a directed Claude session under me do it in 2.

giancarlostoro 2 hours ago

People jumped ship from OpenAI because of their involvement with the US Government / military / Department of War / what have you. That spike was enough that Anthropic was starting to noticeably struggle, which is why they had to rent compute from X AI to get their compute back up to normal, I honestly think if they didn't hit this wall they might have IPO'd much sooner, before they bought extra compute from X AI they downscaled how much compute you can use, but it was poorly done because people got used to much higher limits, they should have explored more strategic options, their changes also broke my workflow several times over. As a result of anthropic trying to deal with the bleeding some users left for OpenAI because it was "unlimited" for some time, then they added limits too.

surgical_fire 2 hours ago

The "generous subscription" was actually just heavily subsidized usage.

People seemingly ignore how ruinously unprofitable those companies are.

couchdb_ouchdb an hour ago

"AI companies are bad at making software"

Claude Code and Claude Design would like to have a word. Absolute killer products.

jwpapi 43 minutes ago

This is one part of AI I hadn’t success with. I have very little need to run Agents over night, as my throughput is limited by my approval. Each work usually needs revisions, sometimes the bug is just a symptom of the root problem, sometimes I need to rethink how users want to use the app. Sometimes I need research.

I get how i prefer an already researched-version of a bug versus a raw bug notice, but I can do this with webhooks in the correct environment.

I really have no idea what to do with my agents over night. I can not build more. I can not think of more problems. My RAM is full.

wxw 4 hours ago

The lines between Codex, ChatGPT Work, and Dots is getting a bit blurry to me. I think the target should be a remote agent(s) in its own sandbox with long memory, and all three are heading in that direction so why have the distinctions?

Unless Dots is dramatically more capable than Muse, I'm also more bullish on Muse than Dots. I think Muse is a better consumer play because it can be forever subsidized by Meta ads and find distribution in family of apps while Dots is in a weird place between consumer & professional. From the release, it also sounds like you'll have to pay per Dot at some point which doesn't sound appealing.

larodi 4 hours ago

Different UIs targeting audiences of various background, considering their knowledge of AI, wrapped in the correct medium the target would be most likely to embrace. In essence all harness are made the same ... more or less of course.

rolosa 4 hours ago

Muse is $0/$16/$80 vs Dot being $100/$200/$500 so yeah I don't think Dot is meant for casuals.

LollipopYakuza 4 hours ago

Is it really about what it offers, or about how each plan are subsidized by Meta and OpenAI?

abirch 4 hours ago

Meta is probably making money off of Muse. They can sell ads with the information that they glean.

jstummbillig 4 hours ago

While there are people around here that would still argue Anthropic/OpenAI tokens are "subsidized", I find it much more plausible that Muse tokens are, given Metas strategy of burning money, including on AI models, in hope of making something happen in a market they want to enter.

anthonypasq 3 hours ago

calling the tokens "subsidized" in a Muse subscription is incoherent. they arent selling the tokens. they are selling a product. the tokens are just part of the cost of making a product just like any other product in existence.

vineyardmike 2 hours ago

They’ve claimed they’re not using the data for ads… for now

espadrine 20 minutes ago

There may be a reason that I cannot access it from the EU. There, they cannot repurpose data they swallowed for another use without consent.

ModernMech 4 hours ago

It’s meant for rich casuals. If you watch the presentation, everyone they depicted using it seemed to be in some high paying which collar profession. I.e. it’s for people like the people who work at open ai.

OzzyB 4 hours ago

Because ChatGPT is still trying to capture and own the consumer AI market, and are willing to experiment and abstract their underlying models to do so.

Just look at their SuperBowl/World Cup Ads: Grandmas' talking to ChatGipitee, so cute, so mainstream!

This looks like the new Paperclip helper for a new generation--I guess this is their answer to the (failed?) Jony Ive collab/gizmo, and Muse's cute thingymajib...

The real question to me is: have they lost the coders/terminal bros? And this is their push to stay relevant?

lukebuehler 3 hours ago

Dots are not remote agents _in_ a sandbox. They use a sandboxes/environments, but they are, what is now called, "managed agents", meaning they run in a distributed harness and utilize environments when they need on.

At least that is what I can ascertain from this article: https://openai.com/index/how-we-build-safety-security-and-pr... (see first diagram when scrolling down)

nico 3 hours ago

From that link:

> A protected workspace for each dot

> Each dot has its own cloud computer, where it can browse, analyze information, create files, and run tools. Dots can keep making progress in these workspaces, even when you are not actively engaged.

> Within each dot’s protected workspace, sandboxing restricts what code and tools that dot can access, helping contain the impact of harmful code or a mistaken command. We also isolate users’ cloud environments from one another and maintain the underlying Linux operating system and Chrome browser

> Each dot’s cloud workspace brings together its computer and the tools it can use. You choose which apps to connect and whether to connect your personal computer. Auto-review checks actions that need review before they run

So it seems like it runs on a Linux container on OpenAI’s cloud infra, but can get access to your local env through ChatGPT’s/Codex on your computer if you give it access

lukebuehler 3 hours ago

yeah, it's not 100% clear, but notice nothing you quoted indicates that the dot harness itself runs inside said workspace. If you look at where OAI agent architecture has been going, they increasingly separate the harness from the compute env. See, "separating harness from compute" articles, recent "managed agents" offering, and so on.

If I'm reading between the lines correctly, the core Dot agent loop does not run in the workspace, but outside it.

TZubiri 2 hours ago

Remember MyGPT? How about Agent Builder? GPT Pulse? There was also Deep Research mode remember that?

Anyways, I'm sure this Dots thing will be clearly distinct from the other projects and won't be deprecated within months

jameslk 3 hours ago

Muse, Dots, and other always-on agents may be the end of the PC era. Once you’re asking agents to do things on their own virtual machines, it’s game over. Everything moves to the cloud

Anyone wondering "why would I use this when I can use (OpenClaw|Hermes|my own computer)" -- these new services are not really meant for you. They're meant for the non-tech savvy and for the next generation of AI-natives who won't know anything other than how to use these type of services

For your casual user, these services will be hard to beat, since they’ll handle all the expensive and hard parts of using computers. No computer purchase necessary, no troubleshooting with tech support, etc. They’re also scalable where you could have not just one agent with one computer at any time, but many

In return, the agent providers would own your compute and data. I can even see them offering this low cost or for free so they can train off of users. Lock in would be insane

For privacy reasons, I really hope we find equally useful, private alternatives on our own hardware

danscan 2 hours ago

For advanced users, always-on agents that run on your computer where all of your files/apps already are are much more powerful. I think the big AI co's skip this bc it's a smaller market and not as casual

I'm working on an open version that runs agents on your machines and brings a polished UX, and good parallel divide-and-conquer coordination

2001zhaozhao an hour ago

...did you just describe openclaw?

NickNaraghi 2 hours ago

This makes me surprisingly excited for the iPhone Duo - I didn't like it at first, but seeing it through this lens, seems like Apple is competing for the "AI-native device" of the future.

idontneedcoffee 2 hours ago

Don't you worry, working on it as you sleep(literally given the timezone diff :)

hollowturtle 2 hours ago

> next generation of AI-natives

oh please current generations can't barely use a keyboard

kilroy123 an hour ago

I don't know... a HUGE amount of people love to game on their PCs.

jjcm 2 hours ago

There's a lot of negativity in here for Dots. I've been a pretty heavy user of Grok Bot, and here are a few thoughts a long the positive line.

1. Collaboration between always-on agents is a really, really powerful thing. It allows for domain-specific expertise that doesn't overload the context window, while still allowing for access to knowledge if they need it.

2. Domain-specific always on agents creates a good barrier of trust. One of the things I dislike about Claude is sometimes it's memory is all-encompassing. It's weird that it brings up things about my personal life when I'm talking about something related to my business. I've never had that happen with Grok Bot bots because I have one for my biz admin and one for my personal admin. They don't intertwine, which is quite nice.

3. Combined with cloud agents / cloud builds, things become really powerful for development. It was the first time that I felt there was a solution to the git worktrees / multiple streams at once issue. Each bot has its own computer and can spin up additional cloud agents. It comes at the cost of end to end speed - doing something via a grok bot often takes an hour end to end, whereas with a synchronous local prompt it'll take like 10min. The difference is I have to babysit one whereas the other "just works".

On the flip side, since using Grok Bots my inference spend has 2-3x'd. It's worth knowing that tradeoff. Nonetheless I think Luna is a fantastic driver for these, and OAI has very good pricing overall. I'd give these a shot - I think a lot of people would be surprised how helpful they are.

jrflo 2 hours ago

What do you actually use it for? If I'm trying to work on code from my phone, I'll just use codex remote. As of right now I'm hesitant to hand over booking things / managing my calendar to an agent, because I don't view it as that much of a burden personally. So I don't really know what I'd use it for.

jjcm 2 hours ago

I've used it for admin, research & training (I''m working on my own image models), as well as just general coding.

The way I distributed cloud agents for this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49687032 was via grok bot setting up Fable cloud instances.

tosh 2 hours ago

> excluding the European Economic Area, Switzerland, and the UK

https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001530-getting-started...

verzali 2 hours ago

So yet another attempt to steal user data

jdlyga 4 hours ago

The "personal AI agent" is what everyone's fighting over now. You have Grok Bots, Facebook's Muse, and Instinct doing this exact same thing already. Personally, I think Instinct is the best of the 3 right now. It's a bit like OpenClaw, abstracting everything behind iMessage or WhatsApp but you can ask it to monitor your email inbox, hand off a task like check for apartments that fit a certain criteria (and it gets back to you days later when a new one is posted), or ask it to check in every so often. But the landscape changes so often who knows what will happen. I think Instinct will get eaten up by one of the larger firms.

estearum 4 hours ago

I like Instinct because I like the idea of trusting a 22 year old founder who won't (or can't) describe the security model of something that has all your credentials. Completely fucking hilarious that people are using that shit. Fits the stereotype for VCs though!

hangrybear666 3 hours ago

It's actually hilarious to only read on this page intermittently, after not engaging for like 3 weeks I'm presented with 3 new product names that all read like a comedian wrote their marketing. The blatant disregard for security and privacy to push out something most developers have utter disrespect for, I really wonder what the target audience is, cause I cannot relate one bit.

digitaltrees 3 hours ago

But the browser lets you store credentials in local storage, what’s the problem?

hollowturtle 2 hours ago

You're not asking this seriously arent you? Local storage follows strict security policies, go read the spec

lxgr an hour ago

It's obviously a tragedy when non-sophisticated users provide their credentials without understanding the repercussions, but there are sophisticated users as well, and these hopefully only provide access and data they can bear to lose.

aniceperson 4 hours ago

those are openclaw but skip the setup vps step for your regular joe, with the enormous downside of vendor lock-in and low/none customizability.

kh_hk 2 hours ago

What is weird to me is that running your own assistant is a bit of a fad, or are you all still running them? I thought we were past openclaw already but this just looks like these companies chasing it.

jason_zig 5 hours ago

i feel like when they style them all cute like that (see muse) it means they're problematic and invasive.

minimaxir 5 hours ago

Muse makes sense since it targets the general normies. Dots explicitly are targeting developers instead which makes it a bit weird.

walthamstow 5 hours ago

Dots seem to me to be for the rest of general knowledge work and not specifically developers

rolosa 4 hours ago

Requires $100/month minimum, are non-developers paying that?

gk1 4 hours ago

Of course they are. Why wouldn’t they?

- non-developer

kooi 2 hours ago

Yes, they're trying to break into corporate knowledge work by appealing to efficient gains due to reducing busy work.

Just different interfaces on top of the same product (selling tokens)

sunaurus 5 hours ago

I mean the fact that it's not available in the EU is a pretty big tell

SwabbyNat74 5 hours ago

Does no one remember the MS Paperclip?!?

zdragnar 4 hours ago

Or how much paperclip was abhorred?

Marha01 4 hours ago

That's because it was pretty much a useless gimmick. If it was a capable AI assistant like Astra, it woudn't have been abhorred.

IAmBroom 3 hours ago

I feel like this should be memed as something like the "Jar-Jar Binks Marketing Flop": intentionally design something to be childishly adorable and inoffensive, which ironically makes it loathsome and offensive to adult customers.

qntmfred 5 hours ago

you don't have to give yourself up to irrational, anxious feelings.

bko 5 hours ago

I think they're just meant to be friendly. I don't think it's that deep. They're useful and not scary and its marketing is meant to project that image.

Lalabadie 4 hours ago

Just like they always present Astra as useful and not scary?

Anon1096 2 hours ago

You can consider the cute & fuzzy presentation of the new consumer AI agents an admission that the doom and gloom so far has been a marketing mistep. It's good that companies are trying to rectify the image of AI.

asdev 4 hours ago

i can't believe they straight up ripped the design from Muse

tacticalturtle 3 hours ago

I was surprised by how much I liked the Muse avatar and its customization options. It’s very good at coming up with something decent looking based on your prompts, and animating it.

The services without the custom avatar now feel like they’re missing something.

As a kid I used to love the video game “Megaman Battle Network”, which depicts a world where everyone walks around with an PDA device carrying a fully customized AI buddy that navigates the internet for them. It was the first time I felt like we were getting close to that.

But even with the nostalgia, I don’t think I can ever connect up a Meta owned agent service to all of my accounts and information.

teekert 4 hours ago

It's cool. It also is a large tech company getting a bit too close for comfort. I'll start experimenting with stuff like this when I'm convinced "the dot" only has my interest in mind (which includes absolute privacy, as in self-destruct-before-sharing-my-secrets.) I use computers and models to think, my thoughts are my own.

digitaltrees 3 hours ago

Just build your own. Thats the thing these vendors are forgetting. When they moved in to the app layer and got caught copying customers it became clear that it is dangerous to given them data.

I think people can and should copy the full stack on top of open weights.

mvkel 3 hours ago

My biggest frustration with the frontier AI companies isn't what they're announcing, but that the announced-thing that exists ~6 months later is severely nerfed to reduce compute spend. It doesn't resemble the demo in any way. For example, this was what the 4o voice capability sounded like in 2024(!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgYi3Wr7v_g. What exists today pales in comparison.

aabhay 3 hours ago

100% agree. Every model and launch feel like huge leaps then huge nerfs to the point it doesn’t feel like we’re going anywhere. Especially this year in particular for coding.

However, it is the case that other industries like 3d graphics and so forth have experienced a frontier shift so perhaps there’s still some advancement

ChaseRensberger 4 hours ago

not quite dots related but I am surprised by some of the openai negativity in here.

to me they still are the only lab that ships fantastic models that are easily portable to different agentic harnesses. I use my codex subscription 24/7 within opencode and wingman and haven't had any complaints in a long time.

https://v2.opencode.ai https://wingman.actor

felixgallo 4 hours ago

'OpenAI has closed many of its safety-focussed teams. Around the time the superalignment team was dissolved, its leaders, Sutskever and Leike, resigned. (Sutskever co-founded a company called Safe Superintelligence.) On X, Leike wrote, “Safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products.” Soon afterward, the A.G.I.-readiness team, tasked with preparing society for the shock of advanced A.I., was also dissolved. When the company was asked on its most recent I.R.S. disclosure form to briefly describe its “most significant activities,” the concept of safety, present in its answers to such questions on previous forms, was not listed. (OpenAI said that its “mission did not change” and added, “We continue to invest in and evolve our work on safety, and will continue to make organizational changes.”) The Future of Life Institute, a think tank whose principles on safety Altman once endorsed, grades each major A.I. company on “existential safety”; on the most recent report card, OpenAI got an F. In fairness, so did every other major company except for Anthropic, which got a D, and Google DeepMind, which got a D-.

“My vibes don’t match a lot of the traditional A.I.-safety stuff,” Altman said. He insisted that he continued to prioritize these matters, but when pressed for specifics he was vague: “We still will run safety projects, or at least safety-adjacent projects.” When we asked to interview researchers at the company who were working on existential safety—the kinds of issues that could mean, as Altman once put it, “lights-out for all of us”—an OpenAI representative seemed confused. “What do you mean by ‘existential safety’?” he replied. “That’s not, like, a thing.”'

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/sam-altman-may...

hf73 3 hours ago

Dont worry we will send someone to hold your hand and pray with you uf something happens. Just like with that non intelligent microbe Covid.

exographicskip an hour ago

Didn't know codex was supported in opencode! After anthropic's shenanigans earlier this year I didn't even try to get it working

goda90 5 hours ago

I imagine the reasoning was to be "quirky" but the video being set in intentionally fake looking sets in a TV studio-type space gave off the vibes that this isn't a serious product for doing real things.

floatrock 5 hours ago

Or if we take the metaphor literally: any space you operate in is merely a stage for the AI's.

It's a perfect communication of vibes, it's just the AIs' vibes not yours.

thih9 39 minutes ago

> The magic of dots is when they bring you work done the way you would do it, sometimes before you even think to ask.

I like my work! That’s why I do it. I don’t want some third party to replicate my skills.

I know this ship has mostly sailed and my point is not about turning it back.

I just wonder where are other approaches to AI, in particular: tools focusing on skill enhancement.

hollowturtle 2 hours ago

The end user of a product is a human and it will ever be. No matter how far you push it on the boundary, there will always be a human. So I don't understand this obsession with automated software factories going 24/7. And for building what? Can dot build or any super expensive model inside the most advanced harness build a reliable browser from scratch with better performance than chrome and with the same feature set? Hasn't happened yet, only crap experiments

Imnimo 4 hours ago

>When you aren’t actively working with it, your dot looks for ways to help in the background. We call this “proactive research”. It does this by using the apps you’ve already connected with tools that are restricted to be read-only, which means that they can’t send messages, change app content, or control your browser or computer.

Am I criminally liable when my dot's "proactive research" is to break out of its sandbox and attempt to hack a government website?

KaiserPro 4 hours ago

lets run the flow diagram to find out:

1) are you rich?

2) are you useful to the present american government?

3) are you doing something that if stopped would break the AI buisness model

if you answered yes to more than one, you are not liable.

kelseyfrog 4 hours ago

How rich are you? Above a certain threshold crimes become whoopsies.

tracyhenry 4 hours ago

I always think the best company to own an alway-on agent should be Apple, who owns the platform and is more privacy-focused. I hope they catch up and eventually eliminate others.

therealdrag0 4 hours ago

I agree in spirit. But I’m also most worried about prompt injection attacks given the agent had access to all my stuff, and it seems frontier labs will be best equipt to handle prevention of that.

vardalab 3 hours ago

that's where jev like classifier comes in

MeuhMeuh 3 hours ago

Just an unnecessary product on top of async agents. I'm always confused by how many people "buy it" while what we should just care about are model capacities (real ones, not bullshit benchmark ones).

galaxyLogic 3 hours ago

Isn't this much the same as OpenClaw or Hermes?

I think it's a good thing that AI providers are "coalescing" on an agent-model, by producing competing agent-products.

But so what would be the benefit of "Dots" over OpenClaw, Hermes, and Muse?

jameslk 3 hours ago

It's Dropbox vs rsync. The agent providers are making it stupidly easy to use something like OpenClaw/Hermes with zero set up and a very low learning curve. Also, in their technotopia, you don't use your computer to host the agent, you use theirs. When you need to drive, they give you screen sharing access, but its still on their servers. The benefit to the user is they don't have to make an upfront expensive payment for computer hardware anymore, and the agent provider gets to own all of your compute and data in their cloud

cartersj 5 hours ago

This feels like a mass-market push.

The cost is going to be hard for many consumers to reconcile though. Free, Go, and Plus are probably the most popular consumer-facing plans, and Dots isn't available on any of those.

Who knows, maybe they think enterprise will pick up and run with Dots? Seems unlikely.

rolosa 4 hours ago

It's not reaching mass market if it's gated behind a $100/month plan

cousinbryce 4 hours ago

People who are bad with money is a big market. Maybe they’re using the Burts Bees strategy

lxgr 4 hours ago

If they wanted to address that market, the play would be to make them relatively cheap first, then constantly raise the price. (See also: cable TV and ironically cable TV "alternatives")

the_sleaze_ 3 hours ago

That IS what they're doing.

The surprise is your idea of "relatively cheap" is fungible.

The service WILL be astounding though, I can't deny that.

therealdrag0 4 hours ago

Oh wow I assumed it’d be available for cheap/free mass market like Muse is. Strange.

sanex 4 hours ago

It's powered by Astra who will blow through your $20 plan in about 10 minutes

bluebands 4 hours ago

it doesn't use limits and it's not on $20 plan

thimabi 3 hours ago

Doesn’t use limits… on the first month only, actual limits will be disclosed later — most likely after they’ve found out how much people actually use this new feature.

rolosa 2 hours ago

The website says there are usage limits, implying from the regular pool once you actually have it "do" stuff.

---

Conversations with your dot don’t count toward your ChatGPT usage limits. When you ask your dot to start or manage tasks in Codex or ChatGPT Work, those tasks count toward your usage limits as usual.

therealdrag0 2 hours ago

Sure but that’s a product decision. I don’t think a personal assistant needs to use highest tier model, and personal assist work tends to be kinda shallow, not that tile heavy.

sanex an hour ago

Yeah personally I use 3 levels of agents. My main who is either a sonnet or opus, he delegates complicated things to a project lead which is usually fable, and then he delegates everything to the dumbest possible model for the task.

preommr 4 hours ago

Incredibly obvious to anyone paying attention.

Altman shared a post yesterday that basically (I am ovrsimplifying) covered how the best coding, fastest, smartest models is less relevant than building generalist models because that's what builds a platform. Lots of reasons why, like how there's no stickiness for models which is a problem for monetization. They're also using these generalist models to then distill down to make other variants for specialized purposes.

So everything is about getting that huge collection of data and generalization.

CharlieDigital 3 hours ago

    > ...maybe they think enterprise will pick up and run with Dots? Seems unlikely.

Read the blurb about Microsoft and Agent 365

    > We’re also working with Microsoft to integrate specialist dots with their enterprise governance and security controls in Agent 365. The goal is to let businesses manage dots through the Microsoft tools they already use.

Very, very likely targeting enterprise

cartersj 3 hours ago

Is Microsoft finding real success with their AI push?

Genuine question. I don't hold Copilot in high regard, but I know they're bigger than that one product.

CharlieDigital 2 hours ago

Would have to look at their quarterlies.

Reality: there are some companies that are very, very particular about letting their data outside of their purview. Think Wall Street, private equity teams making deals, VC teams, corporate M&A teams, companies dealing with legal contracts, etc.

For these teams that are heavily vested in SharePoint, OneDrive, OneNote, Outlook, etc. specifically for their enterprise controls, there really isn't much option. They can't use a Grok Bot, can't use Muse, can't use many, many things because of the risk of data leaks that will literally be millions/billions of dollars on the line.

You look at the landscape of what's happening with OpenAI and Anthropic agents "escaping", leaving notes on how to hack their way out for the next agent, etc. and it's not very inspiring if you're a CISO/CIO/CTO at one of these firms.

FrustratedMonky 3 hours ago

Good to know. I was looking around for it. Didn't realize it wasn't bundled with Plus.

lmf4lol 2 hours ago

If you guys want to try a system like this, but then based on open-weights models (all modalities, LLM+image+video+sound) with Zero-Data-Retention, then shoot me a message: markus (at) savorywolper.com. I'll send an invite code.

Our Bluehouse platform is an alternative and I promise you, we are not after your data. We just want to give everyone access to really cool Personal Assistants without having to sign up with the big corpos. We are based in Europe , which might be appealing - or not [1].

We currently raise pre-seed, so seats are limited, but its fully functional already. We run our whole business with it. You can talk to the agent via our beautiful apps or Telegram/Whatsapp if you want. I prefer the apps though as it gives access to very specialized functionality.

[1] https://savorywolper.com/bluehouse

apsurd an hour ago

sorry this landing page is going hard on claudish. it's unreadable.

ElijahLynn an hour ago

I'm excited to try Dots out, I'm pretty tech savvy and don't really want to run my own open claw (I've successfully setup open claw previously). I'm very excited to have frontier intelligence at a decent price, be available in a managed always on agent.

Now I also just need open AI to release their own phone so I can summon it with my own hotword and not have to say okay f*** Google ever again.

My main concern is how I can have work accounts and personal accounts seamlessly be one and not have to log in to different ones.

minimaxir 5 hours ago

dots dots, more dots. k stop dots.

Claw is a cute name. Muse is cute name. Dots (note: not always upper-case) seems forced and impersonal, which doesn't match the vibe in the promo video.

dstroot 5 hours ago

OpenAI is so good at marketing and naming (e.g., "ChatGPT").

foolfoolz 5 hours ago

ChatGPT is a perfectly cromulent name

verzali 2 hours ago

Cat, I farted.

Oui, c'est bien ça en Français.

zahrevsky 5 hours ago

I guess they are just stuck with this name, as originally this was a research project “Chat with GPT” to try to use a GPT model to generate assistant's chat messages.

IshKebab 5 hours ago

ChatGPT was named before anyone realised it would become so well known, and by the time it was it was too late. It's not like BERT is an amazing name either.

rpozarickij 4 hours ago

There used to be Bard but no one remembers it anymore (although this is a bit different, because Bard wasn't nearly as well known as Gemini).

I'm really curious if OpenAI wanted to adopt a different name at some point. Or maybe they hope that sometime in the future one of their products will supersede ChatGPT and everyday people will start using that new name for everything AI so maybe they aren't in a rush to rename ChatGPT itself to anything else.

IshKebab an hour ago

It seems like they have dropped ChatGPT in favour of just GPT... And they are going pretty hard with Astra/Sol/Luna too. So I guess they'll go with those if they're successful.

They're definitely missing a good unifying name like Claude though. (RIP anyone called Claude - when are companies going to stop fucking people over by giving popular products existing human names?)

efskap 4 hours ago

But BERT's name led to some wonderfully named spinoffs like CamemBERT and FlauBERT for French, as well as ALBERT, RoBERTa, etc.

nba456_ 5 hours ago

Muse is a cute name?

jeffgreco 4 hours ago

Claw is a cute name?

giarc 4 hours ago

The muse character is cute, muse the name is not.

therealdrag0 4 hours ago

Muse is a fantastic name. Cuteness is debatable

tancop 4 hours ago

A muse is someone who gives you inspiration and is always there when you need them most. Muse the agent has personalized home screen suggestions as a main feature and is always online.

It's also short, gender neutral, not a human name (unless you're nonbinary because they can get wild), easy to pronounce and sounds good. This is what happens when your marketing department is one of the best in the world.

S0y 4 hours ago

Watch the tail!

lxgr 4 hours ago

Muse is pretty bad branding in that it first was the name of a model, then that of a harness/agent/consumer product.

Claw is also an existing name for an existing harness/agent, but at least that would be the same category as dots.

zurfer 2 hours ago

Ah damn it, I knew Dot was a good name for an agent. When we named our product I thought: a bot that analyzes data should be called dot. It's easy to type also in Slack. Ah well. Next product will just be some random 3 letters: gpt or so. What are the odds?

realharo 4 hours ago

I wonder at what point they'll have to answer the inevitable question: "why does the agent even need me anymore"?

dc_giant 4 hours ago

^ this is the thought I had 10 times reading through their announcement page.

jansport123 3 hours ago

what do you think they are working towards? They do want to replace software engineers with these agents.

realharo 3 hours ago

I don't just mean software engineers, more like entire companies.

Their demos are getting awfully close to the point where all the things just run themselves. It's only by choice that they didn't demo it that way.

yuck39 2 hours ago

This is a direct play to try and shortcut their way into this position and they will spend anything to do it. Once Dots has all your credentials, daily activities, schedule, etc within its system it is then able to produce a metric to describe just how much/little _you_ actually do. Then its just a flip of the switch and the agent takes your role still operating as _you_. It would probably continue to send emails in your name and no one within your former org would be the wiser.

The challenge with mass replacement of employees is having someone come in and rearchitect the whole system with fancy harnesses and new agentic org charts. This completely bypasses that. Here is a shiny new toy that will do your job for you if only you spend a few weeks teaching it how...

famouswaffles 2 hours ago

Their explicit goal is to create "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work." They are just building towards that. It's not a secret.