Dots: Always-on agents(openai.com) |
Dots: Always-on agents(openai.com) |
That part has always been true
https://sfstandard.com/2026/09/04/anthropic-threat-claude-sf...
Opus 5.5 decided to just randomly `pkill` everything on my laptop the other day. Jailbreaking models is still easy AF. Every single release like this brags about their "safeguards", but none of it really works at the end of the day.
$100 is a pretty tough sell when the competition starts at free (Meta Muse).
On the other hand, Meta is not making money from muse base tier yet.
So, if OAI finds a way to make money the same way meta would for their free tier, maybe they follow suit.
- Cloud workspace (Orb) and agents.
- Multiple agents with different LLMs and system prompts for different roles (Main, Librarian, Oracle...).
- A universal agent (Puck) for managing the whole workspaces.
- Web app or native app to work from any devices.
- Support subcriptions and API keys.
I can imagine something like Dots being utterly invaluable for running a traditional brick and mortar business, streamlining all of the admin work, but until they're really safe and well integrated we'll have to wait...
They're probably over-selling there. I hope. If they're not, a lot of people will be unemployed soon.
Ok but I want the time and attention so that I can do important work. What bizarre marketing.
It's not giving any of your time and attention back, it's selling a world where your attention is always captured by some pavlovian app ping.
Ambient intelligence is only useful with ambient attention capture.
(Indeed: https://clawgpt.com/)
I think it's a great approach for enterprise since interacting with the machines as a babysitted pet disposable entity is the meta today with human workers. I'm excited to start my new role next month as tamagotchi engineer.
Also why do we need another name for agents? It's getting to be too much...
Revenue increasing 51% YOY, wth. Cake vendor cancels another one is found and an appointment that works has already been scheduled?
Are we so much bothered by the mundane? I feel like that's most of the human experience. If we cut out the time we spend sleeping and working, it's the boring and mundane things that make life beautiful.
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Decisions API Decisions API enables real-time decision-making by focusing Luna's intelligence on a specific set of user-defined questions with finite pre-defined answers. Developers supply context using text or images, and get back answers they can use to classify content, route requests, or choose an agent’s next action.
Available in limited preview today with a broad release planned in the coming days.
https://chatgpt.com/#pricing https://claude.com/pricing
It all just looks the same. I get that this isn't the technical details, but it just sends this message that everyone is copying each other all the time, this is the best way to organize a pricing page, etc. Just a weird, eerie feeling.
Next natural step: CEOs staring tens of dots to control other humans and agents XD
I can feel it in the air, every single software business is itching to get rid of as many developers as possible, and move everything to their PMs. Hiring has already almost completely stopped, and some have already started the layoffs. More will come.
- Kids today, probably
I guess Norway and 30+ other countries are excluded.
The donut-shaped image at the very top of the linked page is a big clue, and fits previous reporting that the Jony Ive project would be a donut-shaped hardware device: https://www.fastcompany.com/91587001/openai-hardware-donut-s...
The idea of having an AI assistant help you with all aspects of life is cool and futuristic, but idk, I'm still just out here using a chatbot interface and doing fine.
Living in the EU, I suspected as much. Still sad. I understand it is because we voted in a bunch of imbeciles, still sad though.
God I want the fucking market to crash
I minted what I thought was a minimal-permission Github token for a single action, and the agent I gave it to discovered it had more permissions than I thought, and made use of those permissions. Who is trusting these things with write access to their lives?
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.
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.
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.
And now OpenAI has done the same thing with their fuzzy, friendly, colorful dots.
I am physically sick.
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!
They should try using agents. I hear they can write great software.
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".
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
For privacy reasons, I really hope we find equally useful, private alternatives on our own hardware
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.
“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...
I think people can and should copy the full stack on top of open weights.
It's a perfect communication of vibes, it's just the AIs' vibes not yours.
Am I criminally liable when my dot's "proactive research" is to break out of its sandbox and attempt to hack a government website?
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.
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.
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.
> ...maybe they think enterprise will pick up and run with Dots? Seems unlikely.
> 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.
To discover the rollout for Pro users does not currenly include the UK :/
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.
Claw is also an existing name for an existing harness/agent, but at least that would be the same category as dots.
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.
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.
What I do know is that those cute one-syllable names are meant to make you feel comfortable with AI agents who are deep in your business all the time.
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[a] https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-life-death-mic...
I mean, I feel like I'm going crazy -- but I was struck by this jarring blending of experiences ... shitting out some growth plots followed by autopilot on your wedding. Nice OpenAI. The only thing missing is a moment of self-reflection where I contemplate where exactly I lost what makes me ... me.
Is this what SV wants the world to look like? Mixing fucking cake batter while a bot shows me a regression to the mean website? Pretending like I have any sort of intentionality in my life, while a nameless entity (given quirky form) sort of walks me through my life?
I'm not sure why it gave me this impression, but strikes me as vaguely reminiscent of soma (from Brave New World).
Kind of sad, because the tech is actually incredible: who are they hiring to storyboard these commercials?
The ideal evolution would be for these Agents to work with each other, but it's unlikely these companies would do anything to prevent vendor lock-in.
I really am beyond maxed out at the availability of AI's. They all are so similar now.
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)
> 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
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?
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.
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
If I'm reading between the lines correctly, the core Dot agent loop does not run in the workspace, but outside it.