I Tried OpenAI Dots: How Much Can I Hand Over?

Ksenia (0:00)

Did you miss Clippy? Say no more. OpenAI has announced dots, and my nostalgia immediately brought me back to the animated, but so before its time Clippy. But now it is time. Time to make AI truly helpful. And I'm here at DevDay, where OpenAI has announced more than 20 things. And underneath the long list, I think there is a fairly simple question to tackle. Can we finally leave some work with AI and get on with our lives? When we started this YouTube channel, we talked about Kevin Scott from Microsoft, his idea about capability overhang, the distance between what AI can do and what we have learned to do with it. And we keep getting more capable models. Meanwhile, I still have two inboxes with over 4,000 emails in them. Some of you have waited days for me to reply. I apologize and I think from now on, I will be quick and I will be on time. Or maybe it will not be me. There will be my dot. Turrie.

Welcome to Attention Span by Turing Post. I'm Ksenia and today let's look at dots, the cloud around them and why I think the proactive research is such an important thing. Let's get into some technical details for a second. A dot runs on GPT-6 Astra, which makes it quite expensive. It also has its own cloud computer, browser and the apps you choose to connect. OpenAI says its plugin ecosystem reaches more than 4,000 apps. The promise is that a project can continue between conversations with enough context to pick up the thread. They also say that they don't want to compromise on quality, so for now there is no rerouting, just top-notch Astra. In that sense, Muse can't be compared to it or even Grok. The model here is simply much better. But how can you tell without trying? So I set my own dot up. The dot has a computer of its own in the cloud. Connecting my laptop is a separate optional step. As I said, I can open its computer to see what it's doing, and I can set boundaries around the action it takes. It actually feels pretty intimate, almost inappropriate to look what the dot does in its own computer. Then you, I, we can give it a name, a character, and something real to work on. I was worried that my animated pad will be removed, and instead I would need to use a bit minion-looking template dots. But you can also ask your dot to create an animated avatar based on what it knows about you. I think it's fascinating because, for example, ChadGPT knows tons about me, so it decided my dot will be an owl, a lavender owl, because that's Turing Post's new palette. The funny thing is if my father collects owls, he has more than 500 I've never told ChadGPT about that. But when I saw my owl, I thought, well, apparently this is becoming a family tradition. Mine is called Turrie. Guess why? The first thing I did is asked it to help me deal with my two inboxes, starting with clean out. That is a reasonably clear first assignment, because there is a plenty of material. The first inbox result was rather ordinary. 14 word emails archived after my approval. A small beginning. My two inboxes were still very much there. With thousands of emails, I'm not joking. So it started small, trying the waters, and then it got better and started analyzing bigger batches. We are moving slowly, so from 3,500 emails, I now have about 1,000 to deal with. Again, not me, the daughter is dealing with it. And it is doable. We went through the first 2,000s in just a car ride. It also gathered loose ends into a private scratch pad while we were doing the cleanup and helped me prepare for an interview. And it also did a few work follow-ups that I forgot about. And that's exactly how it feels. It acts proactively and then you remember something, oh, I need to remind John to do this, this and that. And you just unload your brain. Not the curious part of it though, but the very mundane part into the dot or onto the dot. And the dot connects everything together. Yesterday, I was talking with one of the OpenAI guys who is dealing with development documentation, and he has been using dots for a couple of weeks. He told me his dot noticed a change elsewhere in the system, that the documentation no longer reflected. It suggested edits. He hadn't asked to check that particular change. He didn't even know about it. It connected something happening in the project to something he was responsible for. And I just keep thinking about it. So much work lives between the things we write down. Remember to check the document after the product changes. Remember to tell the person who is waiting. Remember that last week's answer may no longer be true. Remember, remember, remember. We carry those connections around all day. On a large project, with people working independently and in parallel, some of these connections, some of these memories simply disappear. And the systems like DOT help with this very naturally. For my work, I have another example. My DOT already analyzed my Twitter and made a few suggestions how to improve it. And it can also notice that a new paper changes a point in script. I'm about to record and fix that. But with all that communication and also remembering Clippy, is the DOT annoying in its omnipresence? Surprisingly, no, at least I haven't noticed that. It is everywhere. It's in your phone, it texts you, you can call it. It's in your browser, it's in the desktop app, but it feels more like a supporting system than to a drowning in information me. So how does this proactivity that seems to be so valuable work? There is an important boundary here. OpenAI says the background research that looks for useful things is read only. It can inspect permitted connected information. That research cannot itself send a message, change an app or operate a browser or computer. Any action that follows goes through the normal rules. The system checks proposed action against your instructions, against custom rules and against built-in safeguards. Some steps can proceed with permission you have already given. Others need another confirmation or a handoff. My inbox is a simple example. That's why I keep coming back to it. Finding a group of old messages and archiving them are two separate steps. I want to understand the proposed group before it disappears from the inbox. That's what the dot does. Clippy tried to recognize what we were doing and offer help. The difficulty was partly knowing where and when to stop offering. More capable assistants, especially the voice assistants assistants that came later, inherited the same problem. They also had access to much more of our work and that was a bit overwhelming. And if Turrie, my owl, brings me useful information every few minutes, I could end up with a third inbox inside my head. But so far, it's been really helpful.