Why Dwarkesh is Wrong about Computer Use + How OpenAI shipped its Jev competitor in 1 Week

Vibhu (0:04)

Okay, we're very excited to be here. Today is OpenAI DevDay.

Swyx (0:08)

We're the first podcast after your last week.

Vibhu (0:11)

We have Ari here who leads the product and engineering team for computer use agents. Before we kick in and dive deep on computer use, you want to give a quick recap. What was announced? What's the quick slew of announcements you guys had today?

Ari Weinstein (0:24)

Yeah. It was a super exciting day. We just got out of the keynote. It was really sick. There were a bunch of computer use announcements that I think are worth thinking about. We have DOTS, which is the new personal assistant product.

That has some really exciting computer use features. There's GPT-61 Sol, which is this amazing new model that I think is particularly great for computer use because of the cost and speed advantages. I think we shared that it's a fifth of the cost as Astra, and a seventh of the cost if you're looking at computer use specifically, which is really amazing. Sorry, there were so many things I'm trying to sort through it.

Swyx (1:02)

In the API.

Ari Weinstein (1:03)

Agents API, which now has computer use in it, which is really cool because now developers can build on the same computer use that is part of Codex and ChatGPT. Then there were some demos of our existing computer use features like App Shots where you can take the context of something you're doing on your computer and bring it into Codex and ChatGPT really fast.

Then Native Computer Use on your Mac where Roman had it taking screenshots of his app automatically and he could do other things on his computer while computer use was using his applications. So yeah, really exciting keynote.

Swyx (1:35)

Not to mention the Decisions API. Decisions API. Off the bat, are they all the same model? This is the same data set distilled to different models?

Basically, is computer use using Decisions API or are they kind of separate?

Ari Weinstein (1:49)

So it was really cool about the Decisions API is it, you know, it has all these new capabilities. It does inference in parallel.

It doesn't have reasoning. It's a smaller model than the ones we use for computer use. And so those capabilities make it really fast. They also make it a little bit less good at doing like long horizon sort of sophisticated tasks. And so I think I would say it's still an open area for research for how we like bring those approaches together. But yeah, I'm really excited to see what people build with the Decisions API.

Vibhu (2:24)

One of the interesting things is dots now have attached personal computers. So it seems like they're very much more persistent. You've been using them for a while. How should people push the bounds? Like what should people aim for? What should they try? Personally, right now, I use it for a lot of customer service. Like, oh, this was wrong. I don't want to sign in. I don't want to authenticate. Find whatever and just get it fixed.

How should we push further? What should people try?

Ari Weinstein (2:50)

Dots are a really cool product because each dot has access to its own Linux virtual computer in the cloud, which is different from our other products.

Traditionally, we have access to a browser in the cloud, or it has access to your own computer. But now you get your own entire Linux computer in the cloud. And so we can run full desktop applications. And it can also use a web browser. And so, yeah, I think the powerful thing about computer use and the reason why I think it's so exciting is because it makes it so that the agent can do anything you as a person can do. Because all the software in the world was designed for humans, and now agents can use that same software. And you can delegate to the agent. So yeah, like anything that you would do on a computer, you can ask a dot to do. Yeah, I think what particularly useful is going to really depend on who the end user is and what's valuable in their life.

But yeah, we just start by thinking about like one of the things that you spend time on and how could you delegate those to an agent?

Swyx (3:47)

Yeah, a lot of flight booking and shopping and honestly, even like playing a game or whatever.

Ari Weinstein (3:52)

Totally.

Yeah, I don't know. For me, something I did recently, I've been working on, I subscribe to a meal prep service because I was trying to like eat healthy, you know. And I really like this meal prep service I found because it lets me customize the meals I order to like a high degree of regularity. So I can say like, I want this many grams of chicken and this many grams of rice. But it was so complicated. It took me two hours to do an order. And I found that I could ask Computer Use to do it for me. And it did it in 15 minutes.