OpenAI DevDay 2026: Dots, ChatGPT Space, and GPT-6.1 Sol

Nate B. Jones (0:00)

The Agent Wars are here. OpenAI just launched Dots, an agent with a computer, a memory, and the ability to keep working after you log off.

Meta offers the same basic setup with Muse, including a free option, which Dots does not have. Your first dot only comes with ChatGPG Pro, starting at 100 bucks a month. So are you going to pay? Why pay? If everybody can copy the computer, if everybody can copy the memory and the background work, what makes you actually keep an agent around? Why would you hire an agent when there's a bunch of them out there? And my answer is, the job it gets right for you. I'm here to give you the full story on what happened, why it matters, and why Dots is both super interesting and also might not be the most important release of Dev Day long term. I've been using Dots a lot. Here's what it did for me. OpenAI's new agent caught a recurring meeting that kept landing on weekends. Do you really have this meeting on Saturday? And I've been just too annoyed and too busy to clean it up. And no one comes to it. We all know it's a zombie meeting. And who likes weekend meetings?

And so it just cleaned it up. It just said, I can take care of that for you. And it rebuilt the invite and cleaned it up.

It also spotted a conflict between an existing appointment I had at the good old Department of Motor Vehicles and my travel plans. And these little things, they might seem small, but they're part of the bigger promise of Dots. It's the idea that the context you've built with AI starts working for you.

And they have a lot of context, right? Open AI is operating a 1.2 billion user product. They shared that at Dev Day. They are in a position to be very successful with a product that is focused on AI context. So I've been using Dots. I've been using Space. I've been using the new Sol 6.1 model that they announced. And if you're trying to figure out what plan to pay for, where your team ought to work, or what you could build with maybe a smaller team, these are the announcements that matter. The wider announcement list is on the screen, of course, and you can go through some of those details yourself or watch the live stream, which is a lot of fun and saved as you can watch it again. So here's what OpenAI announced. First, Dots are agents that you can give ongoing responsibilities to.

Space is a shared place for people and AI to work together. See that context thread coming back with documents called pages that you can edit together. Now we're getting into Microsoft territory. We'll talk about that. And GPT 6.1 Sol brings you more demanding work within reach of a cheaper model. So GPT 6.1 Sol is absolutely an efficiency play in a world where we're asking AI to do more and more. So we'll talk about that too.

Codex got reusable cloud environments for software development, which is a big deal. If you are one of those people who are sitting around carrying your laptop with the screen half open, as I see a lot around Seattle, around San Francisco, rejoice, because now you can put it in the cloud. That's kind of the idea there. And developers get tools to build applications that use agents and operate inside ChatGPT, which I think is actually a huge entrepreneurial opportunity, and we should talk about more. So we'll get into that as well. There's so much to get into. So if you want the quick, what is the DOTS deal? Why are we talking about DOTS and agents? Should I buy a DOT, et cetera? So the quick buying answer is that your first DOT comes with eligible pro plans starting at 100 bucks.

200 is going to buy you more usage, 500, eye-popping, I know, buys the largest allowance, and of course, Astra Ultra Fast, which is basically like speeding down the highway on AI. It's insanely fast. You don't need the $500 plan to get a DOT. Don't think you do.

And after using Sol 6.1 a lot, I would seriously look at which model you're running a lot before assuming you need to buy more capacity. I've run GPT 6.1 Sol, and I've seen firsthand how it feels a lot like Astra, and it barely chews my plan allowance. Like, I can do complicated documents. I can do code work. I can do research work, and I'm dropping one or two percentage points in my overall weekly plan limit for OpenAI. And that's been one of the unsung heroes of this release for me, because for those of us on paid plans, if we're heavy AI users, what we do every morning is we see the agent did the work, and then we go and check and say, what's my usage? In fact, there's a whole popular series of plugins that are all about checking your usage on AI, because that's the question now. And so far, it's been a very encouraging release. Sol 6.1, not six, 6.1, makes me want to move more and more and more work over to it and reserve Astra for jobs that actually need it. And that matches the public reporting, right? OpenAI reports that Sol approaches Astra on selected evaluations at a fifth of Astra standard input and output token prices. So of course, it's not going to chew your plan limits as much, right? It just is not as expensive. So we'll get into the details, including a change. Existing $200 subscribers need to know about that one was less popular. We'll cover that. But anyway, if you put all of these together, you can start to see OpenAI's bet in the space. Fundamentally, they think more of your work is going to stay in ChatGPT over time, so the AI has more and more context for the next assignment. Now, in that world, a more affordable model like Sol 6.1 or whatever future models they release, it's going to let you give it more work and feed that flywheel further. And a shared workspace is going to let colleagues build on what you've already done without leaving the ChatGPT ecosystem. They are building the future Microsoft Office competitor. That's what they're doing. They are going after that same space of collaborative work. And funny enough, as I think about that in the strategy I'm seeing, the distinction I keep coming back to is form factor versus utility. So if you think about form factor, form factor for agents is converging. All the agents are starting to look alike. In fact, there was a little bit of a Twitter fight between OpenAI folks and Grok folks after the launch of Dots, because Dots does look similar to Grokbot. There was some beef. But in the middle of all that, I think we're missing the point. Utility in my mind is not converging. And I know that's a bit of a hot take, so stay with me.