OpenAI has turned its coding tools into dots, an always-on personal assistant that keeps working in the background even when you aren’t asking it to. The product, released at the company’s developer day in late September, is OpenAI’s answer to the question of how people will actually use AI in their daily lives.
OpenAI dots (Credits: TechCrunch)
Alexander Embiricos, the OpenAI executive responsible for dots who leads the company’s enterprise product team, explained the thinking behind it at TechCrunch Disrupt this month. He said the team realized that framing the product as a single entity and a single conversation — not many different conversations — makes it intuitive to use.
What Is OpenAI Dots? An Always-On AI Assistant
The always-on assistant is this year’s big AI trend. The startup Instinct became an overnight sensation with the concept, and Meta has put its full marketing weight behind its assistant, Muse. OpenAI wasn’t going to be left out.
Dots is available in the ChatGPT desktop and mobile apps to subscribers on the Pro tier or higher, with plans starting at $100 a month. Once connected to your calendar, email, computer, and other tools, the agent tries to help you get your work done — without waiting to be prompted.
From Codex to Dots: How OpenAI Built Its Personal Assistant
The path to dots ran through OpenAI’s coding tools. Embiricos pointed out that much of dots’ functionality could already be achieved with Codex, the company’s coding tool released at the beginning of the year — but that required more work and hand-holding from the user.
The breakthrough, he said, was less about new technology and more about framing. “On the product team, what I think about is, how do we make this intuitive and useful to people? A lot of that isn’t building some new piece of tech into the product; it’s how you frame it to the user and how it feels.”
Even the name is deliberate — a play on the negative space inside OpenAI’s logo, intended “to feel like just something that could eventually be ubiquitous.” Embiricos joked that he found out “very late” that rival AI entrepreneur Elon Musk owns the dot.com URL.
The idea of a persistent agent is that it doesn’t need prompting — which means more token usage for OpenAI, and a fundamentally different relationship with AI for users. Whether dots becomes as ubiquitous as its name hopes remains to be seen, but OpenAI has clearly placed its bet.
Also Read: OpenAI Announces Three Big Science Discoveries and a New Way to Work With Academics | How OpenAI Cut Incident Investigation From Hours to Minutes With Codex
Source: TechCrunch AI — read the full story there.
