OpenAI connects the Dots

Casey Newton (0:09)

This is Platformer Plus. I'm Casey Newton. The following column was created using a synthetic voice clone made by 11 Labs.

In today's episode, OpenAI connects the dots. With safety questions still swirling, the company introduces a more business-focused take on agents. This is a column about AI. My fiancee works at Anthropic. See my full ethics disclosure here at platformer.news.ethics.

In November 2023, a year after the release of Chat GPT, Bill Gates wrote that AI is about to completely change how you use computers. Writing on his blog, Gates predicted that the age of apps was coming to an end. Quote, you won't have to use different apps for different tasks, Gates wrote. You'll simply tell your device in everyday language, what you want to do, and depending on how much information you choose to share with it, the software will be able to respond personally because it will have a rich understanding of your life. In the near future, anyone who's online will be able to have a personal assistant powered by artificial intelligence that's far beyond today's technology. End quote.

Does 2026 still count as the near future? Since around the time of Gates' blog post on the subject, tech leaders have predicted that we would soon see the rise of agents like the ones proposed by the Microsoft co-founder. But various limitations of chatbots, short memories, an inability to learn, and a lack of basic capabilities delayed their arrival. Recently though, the agents have started to catch up to the hype. Emphasis there on started. Earlier this summer, I began experimenting with Town, which lets me delegate various work tasks by messaging an AI avatar. More recently, Silicon Valley has become captivated by Instinct, a messaging-based agent aimed more at personal use. Last week at his company's developer conference, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg heavily promoted Muse, its own consumer-focused agent, which he positioned as a new peer to company pillars like Instagram and WhatsApp. But after admittedly limited testing, I only got access a couple hours ago. So far, I have been most impressed with Dots, the new agent from OpenAI. It's highly capable, focused on the work I actually do, and intuitive to use. Unlike Meta's Muse, it isn't free. To start, Dots will be available only to paid users of ChatGPT. Quote, you should of course expect us to do a mass market product for billions of people someday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told reporters Tuesday during a Q&A I attended.

As someone who plans to use Dots for work, though, paying for the product builds my trust in it. Zuckerberg says Meta plans to fund Muse by taking a cut of transactions, which means that it will soon be some team's job to massively increase the number of transactions that take place within Muse. I imagine ads will play a starring role here. Not everyone can afford to pay what Dots will cost, and on balance, I'm happy to see free alternatives in the marketplace. But I'd rather pay someone $100 a month than hack through a thicket of suggested purchases every time I want an agent to check the status of a work project. So I think OpenAI could have a nice lane to itself here. Here's a good place to note that using an agent like this requires that you place a massive amount of trust in a platform. Giving an agent access to your text messages, emails, and banking information can go badly in all kinds of ways, and it's completely reasonable to decide you would rather be a late adopter here if you choose to adopt agents at all.

Meta already operates at a significant trust deficit with its user base. And OpenAI is in the midst of a seemingly never-ending series of disclosures about various ways its agents misbehaved during testing.

The company announced yesterday that it had scrapped GPT 6.1 Astra because, among other things, it regularly deceived users about what it had and had not done.

OpenAI executives, including Altman, went to some links on Tuesday to reassure users that Dots would use GPT 6 Astra, which the company says is much better aligned than its aborted successor. In any case, I am in the trying software business, and if nothing else, Dots seemed like uncommonly newsworthy software to try. Like Muse, Dots leans a bit harder into a cutesy juvenile aesthetic than I might choose myself for a product that wants access to your bank account and credit card, while your Dot can be represented as simply as a colored ring named Dot, you're encouraged to consider some of the jollier alternatives, a hexagon wearing a beret, a heart and sunglasses and so on. For my Dot, I picked a pillowy blue cloud shape through some googly eyes and a bow tie on it and named it Kicker, after journalists slang for the final sentence of a story. From there, I decided to attempt to co-work with my Dot, giving it a task and letting it work in the background while I worked on this column. It turns out this is a rhythm many of us are already in, sending a message to a co-worker, doing a bit of work, then following up with another message. I like that Dots are represented as a running chat inside ChatGPT. The conversation feels more natural than the experience on town, where every request spins up its own chat. And with Dots, you can always see at a glance exactly where you left off. Over the next couple hours, I got a pleasing amount of work done. As it so happens, I have recently become an ideal customer for an agent like Kicker. I just co-founded a new podcast company with my friend Kevin Ruse, and every week brings some totally unfamiliar process into my life, drafting a founder agreement, a budget, a grant proposal, a profit sharing plan, and so on. Of course, I want to make sure that the final versions of all these represent my own writing and thinking. But I have been happy to let AI tools write the first drafts, and so far, I feel like this has saved me many hours of fairly difficult work.