OpenAI DevDay: Worth the Hype?

Shane Thomas (0:00)

Hello, everyone, and welcome to a special edition of Agents Hour. You know, something happened today, and we figured why not jump on a quick livestream and cover it. What's up, dude?

Abhi Aiyer (0:11)

What's up, dude? Long time no see.

Shane Thomas (0:13)

Yeah. Tell everyone why are we here today.

Abhi Aiyer (0:15)

So today was OpenAI Dev Day, and I think a lot of excitement around the day. Last year, the OpenAI Dev Day supposedly killed a bunch of startups. That wasn't true. So we're going to recap it for y'all, and give y'all our take on how we feel about things. And there's a lot of funny shit that happened too. So excited to go through it.

Shane Thomas (0:39)

So we'll start by first going through just everything they announced. You've probably been seeing a lot of online discussions around it anyways, if you're paying attention to this. But we'll cover it all, and then we'll talk through some of the hot takes. I think my first comment as we go through this is that last year, I specifically remember OpenAI telling us the future of Agents was a drag-and-drop workflow builder. So let's take it all with a grain of salt, that I've never used that product. I don't know anyone that has. I don't even think it's available anymore. Exactly. So we will take everything they launch with a bit of a grain of salt, but there are some cool things we can talk about. So let's go ahead and jump right into it. This is just openai.com. If you find the Dev Day 2026 recap, you can see this was from September 29th. If you're watching this not live, you're watching on either Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts or YouTube, that's the day it happened. So they have the full 50-minute keynote presentation here. You can see Sam Altman. We're not going to watch the whole thing. You can go watch it if you want. We're going to go down and just talk through what they released. So the first thing they released is Dots.

Hey, I'm your Dot. I'm new in ChatGPT.

Abhi Aiyer (2:05)

I'll be here to handle everything that comes your way.

Shane Thomas (2:08)

We got new Tamagotchis, dude.

Abhi Aiyer (2:09)

New Tamagotchis, man.

Shane Thomas (2:11)

It's just, in my initial take, obviously I've seen it earlier, but Grokbot and Muse, they're going head-on.

Abhi Aiyer (2:18)

Yeah.

Shane Thomas (2:19)

Okay, I think that's enough. We get the idea. Everyone's seen it.

Abhi Aiyer (2:22)

Yeah, it's a fucking Tamagotchi.

Shane Thomas (2:23)

If you've paid attention to Grokbots, that was the first launch in this direction, which honestly was an extension of OpenClaw and Hermes, right? OpenClaw and Hermes were really the pioneers, like OpenClaw was, got a ton of traction. It was hard to set up. Then you got Hermes, it was more interesting, the memory layer made it even more interesting for folks, still not the easiest to set up. Then Grokbot came in and built what felt like the first consumer personal agent. Then Muse quickly followed Suit, and we talked about this on the show yesterday actually from the MetaConnect announcements. Then now you have OpenAI Dots. It's like they are all just following each other.

Abhi Aiyer (2:59)

They're all obsessed with these little characters and things like that, which I guess are cool. But I don't know, I don't think I'll ever use this personally.

Shane Thomas (3:08)

On the one hand, I do appreciate that Grok Bot and Muse and now even Dots, they're at least like cute characters versus making people feel like AI is going to destroy us all, which is the other aspect.

Abhi Aiyer (3:19)

Maybe that's the Psyop, dude.

Shane Thomas (3:21)

I feel like if Anthropic released one, it would be like, your agent is like a dragon or something, like it's probably going to kill you, but here it is.

So I do appreciate that they're kind of cute and cuddly, but I also think it's a little bit just cliche, it feels like a Tamagotchi. But I do think the idea of personal agents is going to win long-term. I just don't know which of these players is actually going to win it. I mean, I think the biggest thing is most people are going to just use it for simple things probably. But if it got good enough to book your travel or book hotels or whatever, I could see general users using it.

Abhi Aiyer (3:54)

Well, then it comes down to brand loyalty and capability.

Shane Thomas (3:57)

Yeah, and my question is, and it's actually kind of why I think surprisingly, maybe Meta is the best position to win it. Yeah. Because if they could make it an extension of Facebook and Instagram, I don't know. OpenAI does have a lot of users now.