I feel like a lot of these always on agents tie users deeply into the platform. Unlike models that you can swap between with relative ease, with an agent because of the integrations to other platforms, work history and so on it would be harder to switch, since in effect they are essentially your computer on the cloud.
Tin foil hat version of me thinks that all the closed model companies want to desperately build an abstraction layer on top of the model, so that they can limit access to the model directly and build a locked down relationship with the user.
Other inference providers should counter this by providing their own version of standardized managed agents.
Lock-in is easy with these agents because they NEED all of your data to be useful, and they will continue to learn internally about you.
But ultimately the AI company CAN choose to just make all the data exportable and open source their product for self-hosting. (The mainstream ones won't, of course, they want to lock you in and hide their AI prompts and algorithms.)
I think what is sorely needed is a version of Dots/Muse without lock-in risk but is still accessible to regular people unlike Openclaw.
Yep, that's what I think and wrote on my blog. My hope is that the inference providers should provide a managed service like it.
It's also in their best interest to do so, because if they don't and these provider hosted agents become the norm, demand for independent inference would drop.
> It's also in their best interest to do so, because if they don't and these provider hosted agents become the norm, demand for independent inference would drop.
I disagree with this part. AI companies will want to try their damndest to control distribution of AI, so that they can enshittify later.
Consumers conscious of this will want an alternative, of course. Might be niche similar to how Kagi is in search because big tech will always have a AI inference cost advantage + making users the product (extra $ from ads & purchase cuts) + the good old strategy of dumping.
I've been building https://blackbear.app to address the security and data privacy concerns of using agents as personal assistants, and in general to tackle collaboration. I think using Muse or Grok Bot or this new Dots thing is insane... like what an abandonment of self-respect and privacy
It feels like the opposite to me. Moving providers with my Linux VM is incredibly annoying, but with these things, I can (so far) literally ask them to create me a tarball with a README.md and hand it to an agent on the new provider and have it do the rest.
Possibly so for now. But do you think the providers are interested in making interoperability easy?
Even in the future if they are required by law to provide it, I wouldn't bet against the craftiness of the providers to invent some sort of network effect dark pattern to make it painful, if not outright impossible.
Just as an example, with Muse I can already see that the way they are thinking of making money is via taking a transaction cut, so it's not that hard to imagine that Meta can negotiate deals for txns that happens through Muse which won't be available elsewhere.
Obviously I don't expect them to intentionally help me move to the competition, but I do wonder whether obscure data formats as a moat are a thing of the past.
Your second point is where I'd imagine the future moats to live: Exclusivity deals with service providers. Things are already in motion with Amazon banning and Shopify explicitly inviting Muse; we'll probably see much more of that.
Very true. I have ChatGPT set up to do some recurring tasks (keeping track of developments on a policy proposal in politics; on a weekly basis tracking music releases based on my evolving tastes; checking new book releases; basically doing recurring deep dive web research on my behalf and reporting when there is a significant new finding) and this alone keeps me from switching to another service.
The AI itself is quickly becoming a commodity. The ecosystem is what will keep people tied to one of the companies.
I mean it’s not exactly tin foil hat. I suspect when we see the s1 drop for these companies , the business plan will be essentially exactly what you just said.
OpenWebUI has allowed me to avoid this. Combined with OpenTerminal.
I am using zcode with GLM5.3 flash from z.ai due to the extra usage / air drops etc . However nothing I’m doing is tied to that harness.
When I moved from crush to Zcode , the first thing I did was tell Zcode to migrate all of my crush customizations to Zcode and to set things up in a harness agnostic way going forward. It did.
So the harness specific setup is just symbolic links to the canonical .md file in various git repos. Also the heavy use of redmine / discourse / GLPI (via small go CLi wrappers that crush and Zcode made for me ) allows me to remain context / chat agnostic as well.
> When I moved from crush to Zcode , the first thing I did was tell Zcode to migrate all of my crush customizations to Zcode and to set things up in a harness agnostic way going forward. It did.
This works for hosted mass-market solutions just as well! ChatGPT and Claude allow me to download all of my data, and these days data formats are less of a moat than ever given that you can just hand them to an LLM and have that worry about importing it into your new thing for you.
I've even seen explicit "offboarding prompts" to hand to your old agent, e.g. in Meta Muse.
OpenAI won a lot of good favor for the generous Codex subscription and the efficiency of their models, but now that many people have switched over from Claude, they think they can leverage their position to peddle a stream of unnecessary products, and crack down on the generous limits[1] that brought everyone to Codex in the first place.
Anthropic did the same thing. Earlier this year, Claude subs and Claude Code took off because of the subscription's incredible capability and value, then once they gained enough users, they started focusing on unnecessary products no one asked for (see Claude in Slack), and eventually lost their lead. After losing a bunch of customers to Codex subs they realized their mistake, and now they're shipping again.
AI companies are bad at making software; they are good at making AI models. And that's about it.
Nerds suck. They are smelly, have bad posture, manners, never leave their rooms and are generally unappealing.
They also have a nasty habit of being aware of nefarious practices, will resist all attempts to and harvest their data, or lock them into your service, and will drop you if your competitor makes a 3% better product, and will reject every upsell for actually profitable services.
I miss o3 in that regard. if GPT-4o led people into virtual romance and over-validation, o3 gave me the same sort of "madness" but with work.
when I tried GPT-5, I was sad mostly because GPT-5 had some added wordiness. fluff, if you will. o3, though, is a black hole you can talk to, and it only gave information back if there was something to give back. that kind of vibe is my dream coworker
I remember a while ago the discussion kinda steered from "The leading LLM provider will be the one with the better model" to "...will be the one with more user history".
Tools like OpenClaw and Pi seem to remove that from the equation, letting you keep your 'history' and customization while using whatever inference provider you want. If Muse takes off, which seems to be built upon or atleast arch'd similar to OpenClaw, I think we'll see the rise of on-device harnesses.
This would further the efforts to "resist all attempts to.... lock them into your service, and will drop you if your competitor makes a 3% better product, and will reject every upsell for actually profitable services.", imo. In a model-agnostic harness all you care about is speed, accuracy, and price.
Not all Nerds are the same. I've been attacked for questioning why some companies still use Oracle, when most of the ones I've worked at either migrated off Oracle or were in the process of doing so.
> They also have a nasty habit of being aware of nefarious practices, will resist all attempts to and harvest their data
Lol what? Most of the hackernews gang consider themselves nerds and they lap this shit up! Every new overpriced and unnecessary product that gets released by google, meta, openai, anthropic, whoever, they lap it up!
Is everyone here actually a nerd? Or do they just work in tech. You might think they're the same but plenty of people wouldn't. There's certainly different types of nerds
People jumped ship from OpenAI because of their involvement with the US Government / military / Department of War / what have you. That spike was enough that Anthropic was starting to noticeably struggle, which is why they had to rent compute from X AI to get their compute back up to normal, I honestly think if they didn't hit this wall they might have IPO'd much sooner, before they bought extra compute from X AI they downscaled how much compute you can use, but it was poorly done because people got used to much higher limits, they should have explored more strategic options, their changes also broke my workflow several times over. As a result of anthropic trying to deal with the bleeding some users left for OpenAI because it was "unlimited" for some time, then they added limits too.
Claude Tag could actually be really useful. Unfortunately, it's too much of a black hole for money. I tried adding it to incident channels, but if a channel gets left open for a few days, Claude will find ways to burn tokens waking up with empty prompt caches and doing nothing. $400 burned by Sonnet 5 on a single incident created because some alarms were oversensitive and didn't distinguish faults from errors. And I still had to prompt it like 5 times to get it to adjust metrics and tweak alarms correctly. Absolutely insane for a change that I could've made as a human in 10 minutes or had a directed Claude session under me do it in 2.
We should be grateful there are at least two serious competitors, and hope for more. (Come on Europe/Mistral, please do something interesting . . . )
If ever the competition reduced it would turn into an absolute shitfest of nonsense very very fast, and that is a prime reason not to allow them to "pace the frontier".
> Come on Europe/Mistral, please do something interesting . . .
lol. At this point, they're miles behind home-appliance-manufacturer Xiaomi.
(Admittedly Mimo v2.6 is legitimately quite good, and really pushing the frontier in certain respects. For e.g., it's the only music generation model that actually listens to instructions.)
Don't know why this is grayed out... europe does not matter for AI. Nobody thinks or cares about them. Mistral makes some good OCR models but that's it. Nobody is making products primarily for the euro market and euros make nothing even equivalent to months old cheap chinese models. Europe is completely irrelevant.
Did Claude actually lose the lead? They definitely lost a lot of good will but the only people I hear talking about actually switching away are people on message boards. Hermes/Openclaw users did as well but it was always reluctantly to something worse. At work it's still very much Claude first and only sometimes others if Claude fails, which is increasingly less often
> the only people I hear talking about actually switching away
Opus 5 had really bad writing so I switched to OpenAI, though Opus 5.5 largely addresses that and it's not like them building some Slack integrations (or any other non-core stuff) halts the actual model training in any capacity. For what it's worth, Astra is a pretty good model and for all I know the new Sol will be as well, it's just that it's getting more expensive.
The people who switch back and forth between providers every month are a very small, but loud, minority.
OpenAI did pull ahead in limits and quality for a while. Anthropic took it back with the Opus 5.5 rollout. I maintain subscriptions to both providers and use both daily. I can confirm these differences were real, not "it's just vibes and nobody knows anything".
I would bet that 99% of each company's paying customers either did not notice, or did not care enough to consider changing.
I think it's pretty subjective if you mean "lead" to be capability and not raw number of users. I jumped back and forth quite a bit last year because there were some pretty major shortcoming in both. Now they're both quite reliable without too much hand-holding. Codex now consistently works better for the kind of work I'm doing, and it's good enough that I'm not inclined to go to claude, because I don't have any significant problems.
I don't think it's a conspiracy, they're just making the same mistake many other software companies have in the past. When you sell your products to the most discerning and well-informed consumers, you enter into a cutthroat race to the bottom. OpenAI would like to diversify to more profitable ventures, but since ChatGPT they have yet to release something novel that was truly successful, nonetheless profitable, and thusfar nearly every experiment has been a flop, so to speak (ChatGPT Atlas, the Sora App, Instant Checkout, etc).
To survive they need to capture different wide population markets. Can't really fault that logic. The whole point of "SI", is general purpose right? So that would imply being used by multiple markets with multiple products.
This is the standard VC enshittification playbook, people predicted this years ago. You subsidize prices with funding until you establish a monopoly, then you raise them as high as your customers can afford. It’ll continue to get worse from here.
The Bitter Lesson is significantly more interesting than watching researcher companies cosplay at ...whatever you call what they're claiming to be doing.
This is one part of AI I hadn’t success with. I have very little need to run Agents over night, as my throughput is limited by my approval. Each work usually needs revisions, sometimes the bug is just a symptom of the root problem, sometimes I need to rethink how users want to use the app. Sometimes I need research.
I get how i prefer an already researched-version of a bug versus a raw bug notice, but I can do this with webhooks in the correct environment.
I really have no idea what to do with my agents over night. I can not build more. I can not think of more problems. My RAM is full.
The lines between Codex, ChatGPT Work, and Dots is getting a bit blurry to me. I think the target should be a remote agent(s) in its own sandbox with long memory, and all three are heading in that direction so why have the distinctions?
Unless Dots is dramatically more capable than Muse, I'm also more bullish on Muse than Dots. I think Muse is a better consumer play because it can be forever subsidized by Meta ads and find distribution in family of apps while Dots is in a weird place between consumer & professional. From the release, it also sounds like you'll have to pay per Dot at some point which doesn't sound appealing.
Trusting Meta literally a bad idea every single time. Like, every single time. Just use some open source stuff, or hell I've been building this for like the past year because I hate these companies: https://blackbear.app
While there are people around here that would still argue Anthropic/OpenAI tokens are "subsidized", I find it much more plausible that Muse tokens are, given Metas strategy of burning money, including on AI models, in hope of making something happen in a market they want to enter.
calling the tokens "subsidized" in a Muse subscription is incoherent. they arent selling the tokens. they are selling a product. the tokens are just part of the cost of making a product just like any other product in existence.
It’s meant for rich casuals. If you watch the presentation, everyone they depicted using it seemed to be in some high paying which collar profession. I.e. it’s for people like the people who work at open ai.
Dots are not remote agents _in_ a sandbox. They use a sandboxes/environments, but they are, what is now called, "managed agents", meaning they run in a distributed harness and utilize environments when they need on.
> Each dot has its own cloud computer, where it can browse, analyze information, create files, and run tools. Dots can keep making progress in these workspaces, even when you are not actively engaged.
> Within each dot’s protected workspace, sandboxing restricts what code and tools that dot can access, helping contain the impact of harmful code or a mistaken command. We also isolate users’ cloud environments from one another and maintain the underlying Linux operating system and Chrome browser
> Each dot’s cloud workspace brings together its computer and the tools it can use. You choose which apps to connect and whether to connect your personal computer. Auto-review checks actions that need review before they run
So it seems like it runs on a Linux container on OpenAI’s cloud infra, but can get access to your local env through ChatGPT’s/Codex on your computer if you give it access
yeah, it's not 100% clear, but notice nothing you quoted indicates that the dot harness itself runs inside said workspace. If you look at where OAI agent architecture has been going, they increasingly separate the harness from the compute env. See, "separating harness from compute" articles, recent "managed agents" offering, and so on.
If I'm reading between the lines correctly, the core Dot agent loop does not run in the workspace, but outside it.
Give me like two weeks and https://blackbear.app will have a way more secure and open way of providing "always-on" features. These guys are data hoarding and as untrustworthy as it gets
Different UIs targeting audiences of various background, considering their knowledge of AI, wrapped in the correct medium the target would be most likely to embrace. In essence all harness are made the same ... more or less of course.
Because ChatGPT is still trying to capture and own the consumer AI market, and are willing to experiment and abstract their underlying models to do so.
Just look at their SuperBowl/World Cup Ads: Grandmas' talking to ChatGipitee, so cute, so mainstream!
This looks like the new Paperclip helper for a new generation--I guess this is their answer to the (failed?) Jony Ive collab/gizmo, and Muse's cute thingymajib...
The real question to me is: have they lost the coders/terminal bros? And this is their push to stay relevant?
Muse, Dots, and other always-on agents may be the end of the PC era. Once you’re asking agents to do things on their own virtual machines, it’s game over. Everything moves to the cloud
Anyone wondering "why would I use this when I can use (OpenClaw|Hermes|my own computer)" -- these new services are not really meant for you. They're meant for the non-tech savvy and for the next generation of AI-natives who won't know anything other than how to use these type of services
For your casual user, these services will be hard to beat, since they’ll handle all the expensive and hard parts of using computers. No computer purchase necessary, no troubleshooting with tech support, etc. They’re also scalable where you could have not just one agent with one computer at any time, but many
In return, the agent providers would own your compute and data. I can even see them offering this low cost or for free so they can train off of users. Lock in would be insane
For privacy reasons, I really hope we find equally useful, private alternatives on our own hardware
For advanced users, always-on agents that run on your computer where all of your files/apps already are are much more powerful. I think the big AI co's skip this bc it's a smaller market and not as casual
I'm working on an open version that runs agents on your machines and brings a polished UX, and good parallel divide-and-conquer coordination
This makes me surprisingly excited for the iPhone Duo - I didn't like it at first, but seeing it through this lens, seems like Apple is competing for the "AI-native device" of the future.
I think that’s kind of the point. People won’t be touch typing on a desktop keyboard. They’ll be using their voice or phone keyboards. They’re certainly proficient at that.
There's a lot of negativity in here for Dots. I've been a pretty heavy user of Grok Bot, and here are a few thoughts a long the positive line.
1. Collaboration between always-on agents is a really, really powerful thing. It allows for domain-specific expertise that doesn't overload the context window, while still allowing for access to knowledge if they need it.
2. Domain-specific always on agents creates a good barrier of trust. One of the things I dislike about Claude is sometimes it's memory is all-encompassing. It's weird that it brings up things about my personal life when I'm talking about something related to my business. I've never had that happen with Grok Bot bots because I have one for my biz admin and one for my personal admin. They don't intertwine, which is quite nice.
3. Combined with cloud agents / cloud builds, things become really powerful for development. It was the first time that I felt there was a solution to the git worktrees / multiple streams at once issue. Each bot has its own computer and can spin up additional cloud agents. It comes at the cost of end to end speed - doing something via a grok bot often takes an hour end to end, whereas with a synchronous local prompt it'll take like 10min. The difference is I have to babysit one whereas the other "just works".
On the flip side, since using Grok Bots my inference spend has 2-3x'd. It's worth knowing that tradeoff. Nonetheless I think Luna is a fantastic driver for these, and OAI has very good pricing overall. I'd give these a shot - I think a lot of people would be surprised how helpful they are.
What do you actually use it for? If I'm trying to work on code from my phone, I'll just use codex remote. As of right now I'm hesitant to hand over booking things / managing my calendar to an agent, because I don't view it as that much of a burden personally. So I don't really know what I'd use it for.
Ok so not that many months ago, the consensus seemed to be that the smart take on openclaw was "don't trust it; don't give it write or delete access to anything you care about; don't give it read access to anything sensitive; expect that it may go off the rails and delete your inbox and send checks to that prince in your spam folder at any time. If you still have tasks that it can do within those restrictions, have fun."
Today the models are better, but they don't seem trustworthy or reliable enough that I want to give them them a lot of access or freedom. My coding agents sometimes still go off in the wrong direction, or say they did something other than what they did, or say they will do something and then immediately stop without doing anything.
The always-running (so almost never supervised) agent that is meant to do the same work as a person (and therefore needs _access_ like a person) seems like a notorious footgun from earlier this year was just made more powerful, and the companies that are supposed to know the most are telling you to connect it to everything.
The "personal AI agent" is what everyone's fighting over now. You have Grok Bots, Facebook's Muse, and Instinct doing this exact same thing already. Personally, I think Instinct is the best of the 3 right now. It's a bit like OpenClaw, abstracting everything behind iMessage or WhatsApp but you can ask it to monitor your email inbox, hand off a task like check for apartments that fit a certain criteria (and it gets back to you days later when a new one is posted), or ask it to check in every so often. But the landscape changes so often who knows what will happen. I think Instinct will get eaten up by one of the larger firms.
I like Instinct because I like the idea of trusting a 22 year old founder who won't (or can't) describe the security model of something that has all your credentials. Completely fucking hilarious that people are using that shit. Fits the stereotype for VCs though!
It's obviously a tragedy when non-sophisticated users provide their credentials without understanding the repercussions, but there are sophisticated users as well, and these hopefully only provide access and data they can bear to lose.
It's actually hilarious to only read on this page intermittently, after not engaging for like 3 weeks I'm presented with 3 new product names that all read like a comedian wrote their marketing. The blatant disregard for security and privacy to push out something most developers have utter disrespect for, I really wonder what the target audience is, cause I cannot relate one bit.
What is weird to me is that running your own assistant is a bit of a fad, or are you all still running them? I thought we were past openclaw already but this just looks like these companies chasing it.
I think they're just meant to be friendly. I don't think it's that deep. They're useful and not scary and its marketing is meant to project that image.
You can consider the cute & fuzzy presentation of the new consumer AI agents an admission that the doom and gloom so far has been a marketing mistep. It's good that companies are trying to rectify the image of AI.
I was surprised by how much I liked the Muse avatar and its customization options. It’s very good at coming up with something decent looking based on your prompts, and animating it.
The services without the custom avatar now feel like they’re missing something.
As a kid I used to love the video game “Megaman Battle Network”, which depicts a world where everyone walks around with an PDA device carrying a fully customized AI buddy that navigates the internet for them. It was the first time I felt like we were getting close to that.
But even with the nostalgia, I don’t think I can ever connect up a Meta owned agent service to all of my accounts and information.
I feel like this should be memed as something like the "Jar-Jar Binks Marketing Flop": intentionally design something to be childishly adorable and inoffensive, which ironically makes it loathsome and offensive to adult customers.
It's cool. It also is a large tech company getting a bit too close for comfort. I'll start experimenting with stuff like this when I'm convinced "the dot" only has my interest in mind (which includes absolute privacy, as in self-destruct-before-sharing-my-secrets.) I use computers and models to think, my thoughts are my own.
Just build your own. Thats the thing these vendors are forgetting. When they moved in to the app layer and got caught copying customers it became clear that it is dangerous to given them data.
I think people can and should copy the full stack on top of open weights.
Did build my own, it's way more private. Doesn't have these always on features, does have a lot more unique ones, but give me like two more weeks. That "always on" stuff is so ridiculously simple. https://blackbear.app
My biggest frustration with the frontier AI companies isn't what they're announcing, but that the announced-thing that exists ~6 months later is severely nerfed to reduce compute spend. It doesn't resemble the demo in any way. For example, this was what the 4o voice capability sounded like in 2024(!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgYi3Wr7v_g. What exists today pales in comparison.
100% agree. Every model and launch feel like huge leaps then huge nerfs to the point it doesn’t feel like we’re going anywhere. Especially this year in particular for coding.
However, it is the case that other industries like 3d graphics and so forth have experienced a frontier shift so perhaps there’s still some advancement
not quite dots related but I am surprised by some of the openai negativity in here.
to me they still are the only lab that ships fantastic models that are easily portable to different agentic harnesses. I use my codex subscription 24/7 within opencode and wingman and haven't had any complaints in a long time.
There are plenty of self-hostable models. Hell, there are now model-specific runtimes that make it easy to run big models on consumer hardware. Strata, just a couple days ago released, lets me run Qwen 3.8 Flash Next at home on a single 3090 at 90 tok/s.
So, yeah, I'll be passing on these "labs" walled gardens,
'OpenAI has closed many of its safety-focussed teams. Around the time the superalignment team was dissolved, its leaders, Sutskever and Leike, resigned. (Sutskever co-founded a company called Safe Superintelligence.) On X, Leike wrote, “Safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products.” Soon afterward, the A.G.I.-readiness team, tasked with preparing society for the shock of advanced A.I., was also dissolved. When the company was asked on its most recent I.R.S. disclosure form to briefly describe its “most significant activities,” the concept of safety, present in its answers to such questions on previous forms, was not listed. (OpenAI said that its “mission did not change” and added, “We continue to invest in and evolve our work on safety, and will continue to make organizational changes.”) The Future of Life Institute, a think tank whose principles on safety Altman once endorsed, grades each major A.I. company on “existential safety”; on the most recent report card, OpenAI got an F. In fairness, so did every other major company except for Anthropic, which got a D, and Google DeepMind, which got a D-.
“My vibes don’t match a lot of the traditional A.I.-safety stuff,” Altman said. He insisted that he continued to prioritize these matters, but when pressed for specifics he was vague: “We still will run safety projects, or at least safety-adjacent projects.” When we asked to interview researchers at the company who were working on existential safety—the kinds of issues that could mean, as Altman once put it, “lights-out for all of us”—an OpenAI representative seemed confused. “What do you mean by ‘existential safety’?” he replied. “That’s not, like, a thing.”'
I imagine the reasoning was to be "quirky" but the video being set in intentionally fake looking sets in a TV studio-type space gave off the vibes that this isn't a serious product for doing real things.
>When you aren’t actively working with it, your dot looks for ways to help in the background. We call this “proactive research”. It does this by using the apps you’ve already connected with tools that are restricted to be read-only, which means that they can’t send messages, change app content, or control your browser or computer.
Am I criminally liable when my dot's "proactive research" is to break out of its sandbox and attempt to hack a government website?
The end user of a product is a human and it will ever be. No matter how far you push it on the boundary, there will always be a human. So I don't understand this obsession with automated software factories going 24/7. And for building what? Can dot build or any super expensive model inside the most advanced harness build a reliable browser from scratch with better performance than chrome and with the same feature set? Hasn't happened yet, only crap experiments
I always think the best company to own an alway-on agent should be Apple, who owns the platform and is more privacy-focused. I hope they catch up and eventually eliminate others.
I think it shouldn't be tied to a single platform. https://blackbear.app. Local first, end to end encrypted, agents are sandboxed inside the application. Bring your own models.
I personally have very few "always on" things, because I don't think agents are at the point where they produce good enough work on their own to really justify it, but it's easy enough to add this so screw it, we'll see what the next two weeks brings.
I agree in spirit. But I’m also most worried about prompt injection attacks given the agent had access to all my stuff, and it seems frontier labs will be best equipt to handle prevention of that.
The cost is going to be hard for many consumers to reconcile though. Free, Go, and Plus are probably the most popular consumer-facing plans, and Dots isn't available on any of those.
Who knows, maybe they think enterprise will pick up and run with Dots? Seems unlikely.
Altman shared a post yesterday that basically (I am ovrsimplifying) covered how the best coding, fastest, smartest models is less relevant than building generalist models because that's what builds a platform. Lots of reasons why, like how there's no stickiness for models which is a problem for monetization. They're also using these generalist models to then distill down to make other variants for specialized purposes.
So everything is about getting that huge collection of data and generalization.
> ...maybe they think enterprise will pick up and run with Dots? Seems unlikely.
Read the blurb about Microsoft and Agent 365
> We’re also working with Microsoft to integrate specialist dots with their enterprise governance and security controls in Agent 365. The goal is to let businesses manage dots through the Microsoft tools they already use.
Reality: there are some companies that are very, very particular about letting their data outside of their purview. Think Wall Street, private equity teams making deals, VC teams, corporate M&A teams, companies dealing with legal contracts, etc.
For these teams that are heavily vested in SharePoint, OneDrive, OneNote, Outlook, etc. specifically for their enterprise controls, there really isn't much option. They can't use a Grok Bot, can't use Muse, can't use many, many things because of the risk of data leaks that will literally be millions/billions of dollars on the line.
You look at the landscape of what's happening with OpenAI and Anthropic agents "escaping", leaving notes on how to hack their way out for the next agent, etc. and it's not very inspiring if you're a CISO/CIO/CTO at one of these firms.
Sure but that’s a product decision. I don’t think a personal assistant needs to use highest tier model, and personal assist work tends to be kinda shallow, not that tile heavy.
Yeah personally I use 3 levels of agents. My main who is either a sonnet or opus, he delegates complicated things to a project lead which is usually fable, and then he delegates everything to the dumbest possible model for the task.
Doesn’t use limits… on the first month only, actual limits will be disclosed later — most likely after they’ve found out how much people actually use this new feature.
The website says there are usage limits, implying from the regular pool once you actually have it "do" stuff.
---
Conversations with your dot don’t count toward your ChatGPT usage limits. When you ask your dot to start or manage tasks in Codex or ChatGPT Work, those tasks count toward your usage limits as usual.
If they wanted to address that market, the play would be to make them relatively cheap first, then constantly raise the price. (See also: cable TV and ironically cable TV "alternatives")
Just an unnecessary product on top of async agents.
I'm always confused by how many people "buy it" while what we should just care about are model capacities (real ones, not bullshit benchmark ones).
It's Dropbox vs rsync. The agent providers are making it stupidly easy to use something like OpenClaw/Hermes with zero set up and a very low learning curve. Also, in their technotopia, you don't use your computer to host the agent, you use theirs. When you need to drive, they give you screen sharing access, but its still on their servers. The benefit to the user is they don't have to make an upfront expensive payment for computer hardware anymore, and the agent provider gets to own all of your compute and data in their cloud
If you guys want to try a system like this, but then based on open-weights models (all modalities, LLM+image+video+sound) with Zero-Data-Retention, then shoot me a message: markus (at) savorywolper.com. I'll send an invite code.
Our Bluehouse platform is an alternative and I promise you, we are not after your data. We just want to give everyone access to really cool Personal Assistants without having to sign up with the big corpos. We are based in Europe , which might be appealing - or not [1].
We currently raise pre-seed, so seats are limited, but its fully functional already. We run our whole business with it. You can talk to the agent via our beautiful apps or Telegram/Whatsapp if you want. I prefer the apps though as it gives access to very specialized functionality.
https://blackbear.app, give me a few more weeks for the "always on" agents, but yeah, this is way more private and secure. runs locally on your hardware with the models you choose.
I'm excited to try Dots out, I'm pretty tech savvy and don't really want to run my own open claw (I've successfully setup open claw previously). I'm very excited to have frontier intelligence at a decent price, be available in a managed always on agent.
Now I also just need open AI to release their own phone so I can summon it with my own hotword and not have to say okay f*** Google ever again.
My main concern is how I can have work accounts and personal accounts seamlessly be one and not have to log in to different ones.
Claw is a cute name. Muse is cute name. Dots (note: not always upper-case) seems forced and impersonal, which doesn't match the vibe in the promo video.
I guess they are just stuck with this name, as originally this was a research project “Chat with GPT” to try to use a GPT model to generate assistant's chat messages.
ChatGPT was named before anyone realised it would become so well known, and by the time it was it was too late. It's not like BERT is an amazing name either.
There used to be Bard but no one remembers it anymore (although this is a bit different, because Bard wasn't nearly as well known as Gemini).
I'm really curious if OpenAI wanted to adopt a different name at some point. Or maybe they hope that sometime in the future one of their products will supersede ChatGPT and everyday people will start using that new name for everything AI so maybe they aren't in a rush to rename ChatGPT itself to anything else.
It seems like they have dropped ChatGPT in favour of just GPT... And they are going pretty hard with Astra/Sol/Luna too. So I guess they'll go with those if they're successful.
They're definitely missing a good unifying name like Claude though. (RIP anyone called Claude - when are companies going to stop fucking people over by giving popular products existing human names?)
A muse is someone who gives you inspiration and is always there when you need them most. Muse the agent has personalized home screen suggestions as a main feature and is always online.
It's also short, gender neutral, not a human name (unless you're nonbinary because they can get wild), easy to pronounce and sounds good. This is what happens when your marketing department is one of the best in the world.
Their explicit goal is to create "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work." They are just building towards that. It's not a secret.
This is a direct play to try and shortcut their way into this position and they will spend anything to do it. Once Dots has all your credentials, daily activities, schedule, etc within its system it is then able to produce a metric to describe just how much/little _you_ actually do. Then its just a flip of the switch and the agent takes your role still operating as _you_. It would probably continue to send emails in your name and no one within your former org would be the wiser.
The challenge with mass replacement of employees is having someone come in and rearchitect the whole system with fancy harnesses and new agentic org charts. This completely bypasses that. Here is a shiny new toy that will do your job for you if only you spend a few weeks teaching it how...
Ah damn it, I knew Dot was a good name for an agent. When we named our product I thought: a bot that analyzes data should be called dot. It's easy to type also in Slack.
Ah well. Next product will just be some random 3 letters: gpt or so. What are the odds?
It seems that this is the new primitive all AI vendors are converging onto next, first chat, then code, and now always-on Agents. I'm curious to see when or if Anthropic builds something similar to this as well, especially since the market Grok Bot, Muse and Dots is catering to is business and enterprise users, which seems to be where Anthropic is focused.
The ideal evolution would be for these Agents to work with each other, but it's unlikely these companies would do anything to prevent vendor lock-in.
I love these commercials where someone has chosen to show how the AI product will essentially be used to slop out some garbage piece of corpo communication ... and the user basically says "looks good" with barely any thought, then mixed with some sort of real life thing (wedding planning here).
I mean, I feel like I'm going crazy -- but I was struck by this jarring blending of experiences ... shitting out some growth plots followed by autopilot on your wedding. Nice OpenAI. The only thing missing is a moment of self-reflection where I contemplate where exactly I lost what makes me ... me.
Is this what SV wants the world to look like? Mixing fucking cake batter while a bot shows me a regression to the mean website? Pretending like I have any sort of intentionality in my life, while a nameless entity (given quirky form) sort of walks me through my life?
I'm not sure why it gave me this impression, but strikes me as vaguely reminiscent of soma (from Brave New World).
Kind of sad, because the tech is actually incredible: who are they hiring to storyboard these commercials?
Meat proxy at work, meat proxy in your personal time. The utopian visions of AI futures strike me as alternative forms of hell. Humanity accomplishes everything and it means nothing, actions have no real consequence, the bumpy friction and individuality of life smoothed to a plane of perfect optimization.
I feel like these companies are pushing on a string, they are getting desperate to have a profitable product. I'll continue to use my $10 subscription to an AI studio noone here has heard of that has over 150 models. And still use all the free ones, until they quit working.
I really am beyond maxed out at the availability of AI's. They all are so similar now.
Sounds like a cool concept. But this only make sense for locally running LLMs. Otherwise doesn’t make sense to burn tokens on menial tasks that can be automated via one time generated programming scripts
I’m so tired by the AI labs’ 100 agent based products. I understand that they’re still figuring out form factors, but does everything have to be incompatible with everything else?
Actually it seems like their products are designed for maximum token spending. I don’t want to be out of the loop, but they keep pushing multiple automatic actions across agents.
I have the feeling that this is going to open the floodgates for persistent autonomous agents, moreso than what's already been happening. Similar to when Apple does something that was already being done. Let's see.
It would have been neat if they cooperatively updated the board meeting deck using the sensory activity board. The giant dial is similar to our Tonieplay.
I feel the AI provider doesn't get the points, every harness they created will lock-in with their model (why din't they?), this prevent the adoption because people scare vendor lock-in. They may develop these harness within a provider neutral company (owned by them), the harness may success when combining with competitor models, they still gain benefits.
What’s the actual lock-in, in practice? Seems like the switching cost is minimal, compared to the old days of Windows vs Mac where half your stuff wouldn’t run on the other.
In case you are looking for an open-source alternative without vendor lock-in (https://github.com/agenta-ai/agenta) [although less personal assistant and more targeted towards teams and work]
I see that Slack/Discord/... are on the roadmap, but I also see that Slack can be added as an Integration, so I guess what's missing is inviting Agenta to Slack or messaging it directly?
Also, you might want to update the changelog (or remove it), I thought initially that development slowed down, last release listed there 3 weeks ago, but on github I see frequent recent releases.
Surprised people are comparing to muse. Meta reputation is terrible within HN audience, so for people to use their AI agent as an example feels like “muse generated” argument. Unless the sentiment has change quite recent and I missed it
It is kind of fascinating how much convergence there is in branding of AI products. Muse seems to be the one outlier in that the assistant is a little less abstract (and the model logo less buttholesque) but other than that it's almost all converged. Anyone have a theory why that is?
Still not available and spaces page just produces a javascript error. This is the most botched release I've seen in recent history. Negative comments are getting removed left and right here due to the YComb <-> Sam Altman connection.
So the industry is pushing heavily into openclawing their products, "cutemorphizing" the clanker shape and is slackifying the UX so that we can have the familiar UI/UX for the general public and turn the tools more proactive without leaving them too lost.
I think it's a great approach for enterprise since interacting with the machines as a babysitted pet disposable entity is the meta today with human workers. I'm excited to start my new role next month as tamagotchi engineer.
Decisions API
Decisions API enables real-time decision-making by focusing Luna's intelligence on a specific set of user-defined questions with finite pre-defined answers. Developers supply context using text or images, and get back answers they can use to classify content, route requests, or choose an agent’s next action.
Available in limited preview today with a broad release planned in the coming days.
How about the fact that anthropic and openai's product pages are the exact same thing, down to text bullet points. They're the same thing, only able to copy each other, only able to optimize to some vague mean.
It all just looks the same. I get that this isn't the technical details, but it just sends this message that everyone is copying each other all the time, this is the best way to organize a pricing page, etc.
Just a weird, eerie feeling.
In actuality, it feels a lot more like project and middle managers getting rid of ICs
I can feel it in the air, every single software business is itching to get rid of as many developers as possible, and move everything to their PMs. Hiring has already almost completely stopped, and some have already started the layoffs. More will come.
Project and top/middle managers exists basically to keep track of what other people are doing and to make sure deadlines are met and processes are followed.
always on agents are an obvious step: they need more data to grow and improve their models. humans learn continuously and we are always on, why should an agent be any different? I have no problem with this kind of tech, but I do have problems with the company, so, thank you, but no thank you.
The market will always trend towards less friction - no matter the friction.
This will take off and all the time we've spent on colorful buttons and 3px margins will be like old 2 lane highways build next to the 12 lane super-freeways.
What do people think about the dots video? Seems to be a pattern now.
Revenue increasing 51% YOY, wth.
Cake vendor cancels another one is found and an appointment that works has already been scheduled?
Are we so much bothered by the mundane? I feel like that's most of the human experience. If we cut out the time we spend sleeping and working, it's the boring and mundane things that make life beautiful.
Nope. If an AI agent can't intuit how I will feel about an action it's taking on my behalf, I'm not give it access to my digital life. OpenClaw, Muse, Dots... doesn't matter which one. All are an equally awful idea.
I agree. I don't feel comfortable giving AI access to my entire computer or phone...not sure that will ever change. Seeing people give that access to agents without any sort of sandboxing blows my mind.
The idea of having an AI assistant help you with all aspects of life is cool and futuristic, but idk, I'm still just out here using a chatbot interface and doing fine.
Ah, the continued pursuit of normalizing surveillance/becoming wholly reliant on a single service by making it cute with big eyes. Very tired of this already.
Is it just me or the DevDay was pretty much a joke? Considering the backdrop, it was lackluster, so either they independently concurrently were doing the same thing (and was stacking everything for DevDay and got all their thunder stolen) or they did a fast pivot in response to what came out and dumped their original plans.
The long bent shadow of Clippy extends all the way here....... and not sure how they're going to avoid the comparisons and snark on this marketing, at least initially.
More applications need the ability to log in as a "read-only" mode, so you can more safely grant access to tools like this.
I can imagine something like Dots being utterly invaluable for running a traditional brick and mortar business, streamlining all of the admin work, but until they're really safe and well integrated we'll have to wait...
I think this is a flop. I watched the Livestream and the audience reaction at the end was very muted. You could always taste the "that's cute but can we move on already?" thoughts everyone had.
Yes that’s what I meant. Compute requires energy, infrastructure, etc. easily more than 90% of it will be wasted, just LLMs processing meaningless data in cronjobs, for the few instances where there is something actually meaningful to report to the user
I’m so suspicious of that exact claim being repeated everywhere since a few weeks, that really feels like a slogan astroturfed. It’s also fairly shallow analysis. Water is localized, you cannot do a meaningful comparison without taking in account the impact on specific water sources, an aggregate doesn’t give you any insight (other than having a slogan)
> Dots are rolling out in ChatGPT on web, mobile, and desktop starting today to Pro users in markets excluding the European Economic Area, Switzerland, and the UK
Living in the EU, I suspected as much. Still sad. I understand it is because we voted in a bunch of imbeciles, still sad though.
It's a labour saving device. Just like you would use a dish washer to do the tedious work of washing dishes, use a vcr to watch tedious television for you, and an electric monk to believe things for you, you can now use an agent to doomscroll for you.
These recent product announcements sound like entirely plausible satire, but unfortunately most of these pages are not actually intended to be a joke, it's not even amusing, but mostly tiring.
That might be the worst advert I've ever seen. People looking up at childish Ai glow up god beings on huge screens in distinctly childish environments, with cliched decision-makers gasping for West Wing energy...repulsive.
Really, none? Was Microsoft nefarious when they deployed Clippy? I feel like there is an incredibly obvious reason that is not nefarious at all: the average consumer likes cute things
People are already doing most of the work of anthropomorphising LLMs, so OpenAI is just capitalizing on that. Drawing a face on it will make people even more attached to the LLM, they will treat it even more like a person. If they ever get desperate for money they could change the cancel flow to have the cute character plead not to die, and play a cartoony animation of its death when the subscription is canceled. It would stop at least a few users.
Good point. I've though about my own mental attitude when interacting with AI agents. When they do something good I feel like saying "Thank You". Does that make sense? I guess it does because it communicates to the model their output was correct. But it feels silly to say "thank You" to a machine. I guess I just have to get over it?
I actually greatly appreciate that I can put something cute on my sister's PC that comes from a developer that won't bundle it with malware. Seems like they fail miserably at being evil.
It could be to market more towards women, who they may have both independently determined aren't paying for AI as much. I don't have any data to go one way or another but I can imagine lots of reasons to make the agent cute that aren't nefarious
I have not tried it yet but this looks as risky as openclaw, which I also won't use. What if it does something I would not have approved and I only found out about it later? Knowing how often agents go off the rails when I'm coding, I would hesitate to let one do other tasks. I would prefer to white list tasks one at a time as I gained trust.
I spend literally all my work day, and a good bit of my personal time, talking to agents, getting them to do things on my behalf. Almost always pretty tightly sandboxed. I just don't understand how people using these things haven't had catastrophic failures yet.
I minted what I thought was a minimal-permission Github token for a single action, and the agent I gave it to discovered it had more permissions than I thought, and made use of those permissions. Who is trusting these things with write access to their lives?
I heard they use GPT Space (like Notion) together with Slack and use it like a human colleague, but watching the actual demo video, the speed is so slow it's shocking..
Most predictable announcement ever. I would prefer if they just removed scheduled tasks limits instead, at least in Work mode. Just use my usage for crying out loud.
Or if the agent literally just hallucinates a crime
Opus 5.5 decided to just randomly `pkill` everything on my laptop the other day. Jailbreaking models is still easy AF. Every single release like this brags about their "safeguards", but none of it really works at the end of the day.
I feel like a lot of these always on agents tie users deeply into the platform. Unlike models that you can swap between with relative ease, with an agent because of the integrations to other platforms, work history and so on it would be harder to switch, since in effect they are essentially your computer on the cloud.
Tin foil hat version of me thinks that all the closed model companies want to desperately build an abstraction layer on top of the model, so that they can limit access to the model directly and build a locked down relationship with the user.
Other inference providers should counter this by providing their own version of standardized managed agents.
Coincidentally, I published a note on my blog just about this today https://aditya.rs/blog/2026/09/29/inference-providers-should...
Lock-in is easy with these agents because they NEED all of your data to be useful, and they will continue to learn internally about you.
But ultimately the AI company CAN choose to just make all the data exportable and open source their product for self-hosting. (The mainstream ones won't, of course, they want to lock you in and hide their AI prompts and algorithms.)
I think what is sorely needed is a version of Dots/Muse without lock-in risk but is still accessible to regular people unlike Openclaw.
https://blackbear.app, literally been building this for almost a year
Yep, that's what I think and wrote on my blog. My hope is that the inference providers should provide a managed service like it. It's also in their best interest to do so, because if they don't and these provider hosted agents become the norm, demand for independent inference would drop.
> It's also in their best interest to do so, because if they don't and these provider hosted agents become the norm, demand for independent inference would drop.
I disagree with this part. AI companies will want to try their damndest to control distribution of AI, so that they can enshittify later.
Consumers conscious of this will want an alternative, of course. Might be niche similar to how Kagi is in search because big tech will always have a AI inference cost advantage + making users the product (extra $ from ads & purchase cuts) + the good old strategy of dumping.
I've been building https://blackbear.app to address the security and data privacy concerns of using agents as personal assistants, and in general to tackle collaboration. I think using Muse or Grok Bot or this new Dots thing is insane... like what an abandonment of self-respect and privacy
It feels like the opposite to me. Moving providers with my Linux VM is incredibly annoying, but with these things, I can (so far) literally ask them to create me a tarball with a README.md and hand it to an agent on the new provider and have it do the rest.
Possibly so for now. But do you think the providers are interested in making interoperability easy?
Even in the future if they are required by law to provide it, I wouldn't bet against the craftiness of the providers to invent some sort of network effect dark pattern to make it painful, if not outright impossible.
Just as an example, with Muse I can already see that the way they are thinking of making money is via taking a transaction cut, so it's not that hard to imagine that Meta can negotiate deals for txns that happens through Muse which won't be available elsewhere.
Obviously I don't expect them to intentionally help me move to the competition, but I do wonder whether obscure data formats as a moat are a thing of the past.
Your second point is where I'd imagine the future moats to live: Exclusivity deals with service providers. Things are already in motion with Amazon banning and Shopify explicitly inviting Muse; we'll probably see much more of that.
Very true. I have ChatGPT set up to do some recurring tasks (keeping track of developments on a policy proposal in politics; on a weekly basis tracking music releases based on my evolving tastes; checking new book releases; basically doing recurring deep dive web research on my behalf and reporting when there is a significant new finding) and this alone keeps me from switching to another service.
The AI itself is quickly becoming a commodity. The ecosystem is what will keep people tied to one of the companies.
I mean it’s not exactly tin foil hat. I suspect when we see the s1 drop for these companies , the business plan will be essentially exactly what you just said.
OpenWebUI has allowed me to avoid this. Combined with OpenTerminal.
I am using zcode with GLM5.3 flash from z.ai due to the extra usage / air drops etc . However nothing I’m doing is tied to that harness.
When I moved from crush to Zcode , the first thing I did was tell Zcode to migrate all of my crush customizations to Zcode and to set things up in a harness agnostic way going forward. It did.
So the harness specific setup is just symbolic links to the canonical .md file in various git repos. Also the heavy use of redmine / discourse / GLPI (via small go CLi wrappers that crush and Zcode made for me ) allows me to remain context / chat agnostic as well.
> When I moved from crush to Zcode , the first thing I did was tell Zcode to migrate all of my crush customizations to Zcode and to set things up in a harness agnostic way going forward. It did.
This works for hosted mass-market solutions just as well! ChatGPT and Claude allow me to download all of my data, and these days data formats are less of a moat than ever given that you can just hand them to an LLM and have that worry about importing it into your new thing for you.
I've even seen explicit "offboarding prompts" to hand to your old agent, e.g. in Meta Muse.
I mean OpenClaw being acquired by 'Open'AI says it all doesn't it?
OpenAI won a lot of good favor for the generous Codex subscription and the efficiency of their models, but now that many people have switched over from Claude, they think they can leverage their position to peddle a stream of unnecessary products, and crack down on the generous limits[1] that brought everyone to Codex in the first place.
Anthropic did the same thing. Earlier this year, Claude subs and Claude Code took off because of the subscription's incredible capability and value, then once they gained enough users, they started focusing on unnecessary products no one asked for (see Claude in Slack), and eventually lost their lead. After losing a bunch of customers to Codex subs they realized their mistake, and now they're shipping again.
AI companies are bad at making software; they are good at making AI models. And that's about it.
[1] https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2104823812042940713
Nerds suck. They are smelly, have bad posture, manners, never leave their rooms and are generally unappealing.
They also have a nasty habit of being aware of nefarious practices, will resist all attempts to and harvest their data, or lock them into your service, and will drop you if your competitor makes a 3% better product, and will reject every upsell for actually profitable services.
Plus there is only so many of them.
A wave of nausea hit when I first saw the warm, fuzzy, cutesy, kawaii, Teletubby-like avatar that Meta gave its Muse agent.
And now OpenAI has done the same thing with their fuzzy, friendly, colorful dots.
I am physically sick.
im crying and throwing up everywhere. everything i use must be brutalist.
even seeing the linux penguin makes me want to punch my monitor and commit sudoku
I think you missed the point. Things should look like what they are.
The Linux kernel is ultimately a friendly open-source project. There's no harm in it being marketed using a cartoon penguin.
These AI services, meanwhile, are the dangled lights on the heads of data-hungry environment-threatening job-killing leviathantine anglerfish.
Making the dangled light present as non-threatening is not a good thing for society, no matter how much you may personally like pretty lights.
The one time a similar mascot to FreeBSD's would've made sense.
Imagine 2001: A Space Odyssey with Meta's "Jolly" avatar as HAL instead of a blinking red camera lens.
So much more terrifying for a cute, round, fuzzy, friendly, rosy-cheeked plushie trying to exterminate the crew.
> commit sudoku
Hilarious.
I miss o3 in that regard. if GPT-4o led people into virtual romance and over-validation, o3 gave me the same sort of "madness" but with work.
when I tried GPT-5, I was sad mostly because GPT-5 had some added wordiness. fluff, if you will. o3, though, is a black hole you can talk to, and it only gave information back if there was something to give back. that kind of vibe is my dream coworker
I miss o1-pro :/
Yes, it is hard, psychologically, to grant trust to some silly perverse little thing I want crush like a surreal cartoonish cockroach.
Absolutely ridiculous comment can't believe anyone would actually post this seriously.
Physically cringed at this comment
I remember a while ago the discussion kinda steered from "The leading LLM provider will be the one with the better model" to "...will be the one with more user history".
Tools like OpenClaw and Pi seem to remove that from the equation, letting you keep your 'history' and customization while using whatever inference provider you want. If Muse takes off, which seems to be built upon or atleast arch'd similar to OpenClaw, I think we'll see the rise of on-device harnesses.
This would further the efforts to "resist all attempts to.... lock them into your service, and will drop you if your competitor makes a 3% better product, and will reject every upsell for actually profitable services.", imo. In a model-agnostic harness all you care about is speed, accuracy, and price.
> habit of being aware of nefarious practices
Not all Nerds are the same. I've been attacked for questioning why some companies still use Oracle, when most of the ones I've worked at either migrated off Oracle or were in the process of doing so.
Everyone gets 'got' once
> They also have a nasty habit of being aware of nefarious practices, will resist all attempts to and harvest their data
Lol what? Most of the hackernews gang consider themselves nerds and they lap this shit up! Every new overpriced and unnecessary product that gets released by google, meta, openai, anthropic, whoever, they lap it up!
The usage of Chrome and even worse nitpicking of Firefox is such a strange thing about this community.
Is everyone here actually a nerd? Or do they just work in tech. You might think they're the same but plenty of people wouldn't. There's certainly different types of nerds
Not really. I use cloud AI a bit for development but I don't put personal data in it. That only runs on my local systems.
I also swap all the time for whoever is cheapest
People jumped ship from OpenAI because of their involvement with the US Government / military / Department of War / what have you. That spike was enough that Anthropic was starting to noticeably struggle, which is why they had to rent compute from X AI to get their compute back up to normal, I honestly think if they didn't hit this wall they might have IPO'd much sooner, before they bought extra compute from X AI they downscaled how much compute you can use, but it was poorly done because people got used to much higher limits, they should have explored more strategic options, their changes also broke my workflow several times over. As a result of anthropic trying to deal with the bleeding some users left for OpenAI because it was "unlimited" for some time, then they added limits too.
> AI companies are bad at making software
They should try using agents. I hear they can write great software.
Claude Tag could actually be really useful. Unfortunately, it's too much of a black hole for money. I tried adding it to incident channels, but if a channel gets left open for a few days, Claude will find ways to burn tokens waking up with empty prompt caches and doing nothing. $400 burned by Sonnet 5 on a single incident created because some alarms were oversensitive and didn't distinguish faults from errors. And I still had to prompt it like 5 times to get it to adjust metrics and tweak alarms correctly. Absolutely insane for a change that I could've made as a human in 10 minutes or had a directed Claude session under me do it in 2.
> unnecessary products no one asked for (see Claude in Slack),
Hey, I never asked for it, but Slack Claude (ie. Claude Tag) has actually turned out to be a useful tool for a few things.
"AI companies are bad at making software"
Claude Code and Claude Design would like to have a word. Absolute killer products.
We should be grateful there are at least two serious competitors, and hope for more. (Come on Europe/Mistral, please do something interesting . . . )
If ever the competition reduced it would turn into an absolute shitfest of nonsense very very fast, and that is a prime reason not to allow them to "pace the frontier".
> Come on Europe/Mistral, please do something interesting . . .
lol. At this point, they're miles behind home-appliance-manufacturer Xiaomi.
(Admittedly Mimo v2.6 is legitimately quite good, and really pushing the frontier in certain respects. For e.g., it's the only music generation model that actually listens to instructions.)
Don't know why this is grayed out... europe does not matter for AI. Nobody thinks or cares about them. Mistral makes some good OCR models but that's it. Nobody is making products primarily for the euro market and euros make nothing even equivalent to months old cheap chinese models. Europe is completely irrelevant.
Did Claude actually lose the lead? They definitely lost a lot of good will but the only people I hear talking about actually switching away are people on message boards. Hermes/Openclaw users did as well but it was always reluctantly to something worse. At work it's still very much Claude first and only sometimes others if Claude fails, which is increasingly less often
> the only people I hear talking about actually switching away
Opus 5 had really bad writing so I switched to OpenAI, though Opus 5.5 largely addresses that and it's not like them building some Slack integrations (or any other non-core stuff) halts the actual model training in any capacity. For what it's worth, Astra is a pretty good model and for all I know the new Sol will be as well, it's just that it's getting more expensive.
The people who switch back and forth between providers every month are a very small, but loud, minority.
OpenAI did pull ahead in limits and quality for a while. Anthropic took it back with the Opus 5.5 rollout. I maintain subscriptions to both providers and use both daily. I can confirm these differences were real, not "it's just vibes and nobody knows anything".
I would bet that 99% of each company's paying customers either did not notice, or did not care enough to consider changing.
They've definitely lost many experienced devs who can see Anthropic's offerings are insuperior to OpenAI/Codex; I know I am not the only one.
insuperior?
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Insuperior
double-plus-ungood
I think it's pretty subjective if you mean "lead" to be capability and not raw number of users. I jumped back and forth quite a bit last year because there were some pretty major shortcoming in both. Now they're both quite reliable without too much hand-holding. Codex now consistently works better for the kind of work I'm doing, and it's good enough that I'm not inclined to go to claude, because I don't have any significant problems.
The "generous subscription" was actually just heavily subsidized usage.
People seemingly ignore how ruinously unprofitable those companies are.
They're just trying things. It's not a conspiracy to "distract" anyone.
I don't think it's a conspiracy, they're just making the same mistake many other software companies have in the past. When you sell your products to the most discerning and well-informed consumers, you enter into a cutthroat race to the bottom. OpenAI would like to diversify to more profitable ventures, but since ChatGPT they have yet to release something novel that was truly successful, nonetheless profitable, and thusfar nearly every experiment has been a flop, so to speak (ChatGPT Atlas, the Sora App, Instant Checkout, etc).
Codex is for a small software/programming market.
To survive they need to capture different wide population markets. Can't really fault that logic. The whole point of "SI", is general purpose right? So that would imply being used by multiple markets with multiple products.
The generous subscriptions are wildly unprofitable and both companies are just throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks, it's that simple.
This is the standard VC enshittification playbook, people predicted this years ago. You subsidize prices with funding until you establish a monopoly, then you raise them as high as your customers can afford. It’ll continue to get worse from here.
The bitter lesson
The Bitter Lesson is significantly more interesting than watching researcher companies cosplay at ...whatever you call what they're claiming to be doing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitter_lesson
This is one part of AI I hadn’t success with. I have very little need to run Agents over night, as my throughput is limited by my approval. Each work usually needs revisions, sometimes the bug is just a symptom of the root problem, sometimes I need to rethink how users want to use the app. Sometimes I need research.
I get how i prefer an already researched-version of a bug versus a raw bug notice, but I can do this with webhooks in the correct environment.
I really have no idea what to do with my agents over night. I can not build more. I can not think of more problems. My RAM is full.
yeah I don’t get dots. Will try it but conceptually I can’t understand why it would be better than just queuing codex agents.
The lines between Codex, ChatGPT Work, and Dots is getting a bit blurry to me. I think the target should be a remote agent(s) in its own sandbox with long memory, and all three are heading in that direction so why have the distinctions?
Unless Dots is dramatically more capable than Muse, I'm also more bullish on Muse than Dots. I think Muse is a better consumer play because it can be forever subsidized by Meta ads and find distribution in family of apps while Dots is in a weird place between consumer & professional. From the release, it also sounds like you'll have to pay per Dot at some point which doesn't sound appealing.
Muse is $0/$16/$80 vs Dot being $100/$200/$500 so yeah I don't think Dot is meant for casuals.
Is it really about what it offers, or about how each plan are subsidized by Meta and OpenAI?
Meta is probably making money off of Muse. They can sell ads with the information that they glean.
Trusting Meta literally a bad idea every single time. Like, every single time. Just use some open source stuff, or hell I've been building this for like the past year because I hate these companies: https://blackbear.app
While there are people around here that would still argue Anthropic/OpenAI tokens are "subsidized", I find it much more plausible that Muse tokens are, given Metas strategy of burning money, including on AI models, in hope of making something happen in a market they want to enter.
calling the tokens "subsidized" in a Muse subscription is incoherent. they arent selling the tokens. they are selling a product. the tokens are just part of the cost of making a product just like any other product in existence.
They’ve claimed they’re not using the data for ads… for now
There may be a reason that I cannot access it from the EU. There, they cannot repurpose data they swallowed for another use without consent.
It’s meant for rich casuals. If you watch the presentation, everyone they depicted using it seemed to be in some high paying which collar profession. I.e. it’s for people like the people who work at open ai.
Dots are not remote agents _in_ a sandbox. They use a sandboxes/environments, but they are, what is now called, "managed agents", meaning they run in a distributed harness and utilize environments when they need on.
At least that is what I can ascertain from this article: https://openai.com/index/how-we-build-safety-security-and-pr... (see first diagram when scrolling down)
From that link:
> A protected workspace for each dot
> Each dot has its own cloud computer, where it can browse, analyze information, create files, and run tools. Dots can keep making progress in these workspaces, even when you are not actively engaged.
> Within each dot’s protected workspace, sandboxing restricts what code and tools that dot can access, helping contain the impact of harmful code or a mistaken command. We also isolate users’ cloud environments from one another and maintain the underlying Linux operating system and Chrome browser
> Each dot’s cloud workspace brings together its computer and the tools it can use. You choose which apps to connect and whether to connect your personal computer. Auto-review checks actions that need review before they run
So it seems like it runs on a Linux container on OpenAI’s cloud infra, but can get access to your local env through ChatGPT’s/Codex on your computer if you give it access
yeah, it's not 100% clear, but notice nothing you quoted indicates that the dot harness itself runs inside said workspace. If you look at where OAI agent architecture has been going, they increasingly separate the harness from the compute env. See, "separating harness from compute" articles, recent "managed agents" offering, and so on.
If I'm reading between the lines correctly, the core Dot agent loop does not run in the workspace, but outside it.
Give me like two weeks and https://blackbear.app will have a way more secure and open way of providing "always-on" features. These guys are data hoarding and as untrustworthy as it gets
Different UIs targeting audiences of various background, considering their knowledge of AI, wrapped in the correct medium the target would be most likely to embrace. In essence all harness are made the same ... more or less of course.
Remember MyGPT? How about Agent Builder? GPT Pulse? There was also Deep Research mode remember that?
Anyways, I'm sure this Dots thing will be clearly distinct from the other projects and won't be deprecated within months
Because ChatGPT is still trying to capture and own the consumer AI market, and are willing to experiment and abstract their underlying models to do so.
Just look at their SuperBowl/World Cup Ads: Grandmas' talking to ChatGipitee, so cute, so mainstream!
This looks like the new Paperclip helper for a new generation--I guess this is their answer to the (failed?) Jony Ive collab/gizmo, and Muse's cute thingymajib...
The real question to me is: have they lost the coders/terminal bros? And this is their push to stay relevant?
Muse, Dots, and other always-on agents may be the end of the PC era. Once you’re asking agents to do things on their own virtual machines, it’s game over. Everything moves to the cloud
Anyone wondering "why would I use this when I can use (OpenClaw|Hermes|my own computer)" -- these new services are not really meant for you. They're meant for the non-tech savvy and for the next generation of AI-natives who won't know anything other than how to use these type of services
For your casual user, these services will be hard to beat, since they’ll handle all the expensive and hard parts of using computers. No computer purchase necessary, no troubleshooting with tech support, etc. They’re also scalable where you could have not just one agent with one computer at any time, but many
In return, the agent providers would own your compute and data. I can even see them offering this low cost or for free so they can train off of users. Lock in would be insane
For privacy reasons, I really hope we find equally useful, private alternatives on our own hardware
For advanced users, always-on agents that run on your computer where all of your files/apps already are are much more powerful. I think the big AI co's skip this bc it's a smaller market and not as casual
I'm working on an open version that runs agents on your machines and brings a polished UX, and good parallel divide-and-conquer coordination
what are you working on? I'm building https://blackbear.app and it's in the same vein
...did you just describe openclaw?
This makes me surprisingly excited for the iPhone Duo - I didn't like it at first, but seeing it through this lens, seems like Apple is competing for the "AI-native device" of the future.
I don't know... a HUGE amount of people love to game on their PCs.
Don't you worry, working on it as you sleep(literally given the timezone diff :)
> next generation of AI-natives
oh please current generations can't barely use a keyboard
I think that’s kind of the point. People won’t be touch typing on a desktop keyboard. They’ll be using their voice or phone keyboards. They’re certainly proficient at that.
There's a lot of negativity in here for Dots. I've been a pretty heavy user of Grok Bot, and here are a few thoughts a long the positive line.
1. Collaboration between always-on agents is a really, really powerful thing. It allows for domain-specific expertise that doesn't overload the context window, while still allowing for access to knowledge if they need it.
2. Domain-specific always on agents creates a good barrier of trust. One of the things I dislike about Claude is sometimes it's memory is all-encompassing. It's weird that it brings up things about my personal life when I'm talking about something related to my business. I've never had that happen with Grok Bot bots because I have one for my biz admin and one for my personal admin. They don't intertwine, which is quite nice.
3. Combined with cloud agents / cloud builds, things become really powerful for development. It was the first time that I felt there was a solution to the git worktrees / multiple streams at once issue. Each bot has its own computer and can spin up additional cloud agents. It comes at the cost of end to end speed - doing something via a grok bot often takes an hour end to end, whereas with a synchronous local prompt it'll take like 10min. The difference is I have to babysit one whereas the other "just works".
On the flip side, since using Grok Bots my inference spend has 2-3x'd. It's worth knowing that tradeoff. Nonetheless I think Luna is a fantastic driver for these, and OAI has very good pricing overall. I'd give these a shot - I think a lot of people would be surprised how helpful they are.
What do you actually use it for? If I'm trying to work on code from my phone, I'll just use codex remote. As of right now I'm hesitant to hand over booking things / managing my calendar to an agent, because I don't view it as that much of a burden personally. So I don't really know what I'd use it for.
I've used it for admin, research & training (I''m working on my own image models), as well as just general coding.
The way I distributed cloud agents for this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49687032 was via grok bot setting up Fable cloud instances.
Ok so not that many months ago, the consensus seemed to be that the smart take on openclaw was "don't trust it; don't give it write or delete access to anything you care about; don't give it read access to anything sensitive; expect that it may go off the rails and delete your inbox and send checks to that prince in your spam folder at any time. If you still have tasks that it can do within those restrictions, have fun."
Today the models are better, but they don't seem trustworthy or reliable enough that I want to give them them a lot of access or freedom. My coding agents sometimes still go off in the wrong direction, or say they did something other than what they did, or say they will do something and then immediately stop without doing anything.
The always-running (so almost never supervised) agent that is meant to do the same work as a person (and therefore needs _access_ like a person) seems like a notorious footgun from earlier this year was just made more powerful, and the companies that are supposed to know the most are telling you to connect it to everything.
> excluding the European Economic Area, Switzerland, and the UK
https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001530-getting-started...
So yet another attempt to steal user data
The "personal AI agent" is what everyone's fighting over now. You have Grok Bots, Facebook's Muse, and Instinct doing this exact same thing already. Personally, I think Instinct is the best of the 3 right now. It's a bit like OpenClaw, abstracting everything behind iMessage or WhatsApp but you can ask it to monitor your email inbox, hand off a task like check for apartments that fit a certain criteria (and it gets back to you days later when a new one is posted), or ask it to check in every so often. But the landscape changes so often who knows what will happen. I think Instinct will get eaten up by one of the larger firms.
I like Instinct because I like the idea of trusting a 22 year old founder who won't (or can't) describe the security model of something that has all your credentials. Completely fucking hilarious that people are using that shit. Fits the stereotype for VCs though!
It's obviously a tragedy when non-sophisticated users provide their credentials without understanding the repercussions, but there are sophisticated users as well, and these hopefully only provide access and data they can bear to lose.
It's actually hilarious to only read on this page intermittently, after not engaging for like 3 weeks I'm presented with 3 new product names that all read like a comedian wrote their marketing. The blatant disregard for security and privacy to push out something most developers have utter disrespect for, I really wonder what the target audience is, cause I cannot relate one bit.
But the browser lets you store credentials in local storage, what’s the problem?
You're not asking this seriously arent you? Local storage follows strict security policies, go read the spec
What is weird to me is that running your own assistant is a bit of a fad, or are you all still running them? I thought we were past openclaw already but this just looks like these companies chasing it.
those are openclaw but skip the setup vps step for your regular joe, with the enormous downside of vendor lock-in and low/none customizability.
i feel like when they style them all cute like that (see muse) it means they're problematic and invasive.
I think they're just meant to be friendly. I don't think it's that deep. They're useful and not scary and its marketing is meant to project that image.
Just like they always present Astra as useful and not scary?
You can consider the cute & fuzzy presentation of the new consumer AI agents an admission that the doom and gloom so far has been a marketing mistep. It's good that companies are trying to rectify the image of AI.
I was surprised by how much I liked the Muse avatar and its customization options. It’s very good at coming up with something decent looking based on your prompts, and animating it.
The services without the custom avatar now feel like they’re missing something.
As a kid I used to love the video game “Megaman Battle Network”, which depicts a world where everyone walks around with an PDA device carrying a fully customized AI buddy that navigates the internet for them. It was the first time I felt like we were getting close to that.
But even with the nostalgia, I don’t think I can ever connect up a Meta owned agent service to all of my accounts and information.
you don't have to give yourself up to irrational, anxious feelings.
Does no one remember the MS Paperclip?!?
Or how much paperclip was abhorred?
That's because it was pretty much a useless gimmick. If it was a capable AI assistant like Astra, it woudn't have been abhorred.
I feel like this should be memed as something like the "Jar-Jar Binks Marketing Flop": intentionally design something to be childishly adorable and inoffensive, which ironically makes it loathsome and offensive to adult customers.
Muse makes sense since it targets the general normies. Dots explicitly are targeting developers instead which makes it a bit weird.
Dots seem to me to be for the rest of general knowledge work and not specifically developers
Requires $100/month minimum, are non-developers paying that?
Of course they are. Why wouldn’t they?
- non-developer
Yes, they're trying to break into corporate knowledge work by appealing to efficient gains due to reducing busy work.
Just different interfaces on top of the same product (selling tokens)
i can't believe they straight up ripped the design from Muse
I mean the fact that it's not available in the EU is a pretty big tell
It's cool. It also is a large tech company getting a bit too close for comfort. I'll start experimenting with stuff like this when I'm convinced "the dot" only has my interest in mind (which includes absolute privacy, as in self-destruct-before-sharing-my-secrets.) I use computers and models to think, my thoughts are my own.
Just build your own. Thats the thing these vendors are forgetting. When they moved in to the app layer and got caught copying customers it became clear that it is dangerous to given them data.
I think people can and should copy the full stack on top of open weights.
Did build my own, it's way more private. Doesn't have these always on features, does have a lot more unique ones, but give me like two more weeks. That "always on" stuff is so ridiculously simple. https://blackbear.app
Zuckerberg: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuckerberg: Just ask
Zuckerberg: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuckerberg: People just submitted it.
Zuckerberg: I don't know why.
Zuckerberg: They "trust me"
Zuckerberg: Dumb fucks
My biggest frustration with the frontier AI companies isn't what they're announcing, but that the announced-thing that exists ~6 months later is severely nerfed to reduce compute spend. It doesn't resemble the demo in any way. For example, this was what the 4o voice capability sounded like in 2024(!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgYi3Wr7v_g. What exists today pales in comparison.
100% agree. Every model and launch feel like huge leaps then huge nerfs to the point it doesn’t feel like we’re going anywhere. Especially this year in particular for coding.
However, it is the case that other industries like 3d graphics and so forth have experienced a frontier shift so perhaps there’s still some advancement
It's always about increasing monthly active users, locking them in, and then enshittifying to squeeze out profit.
Thanks. I'll stick with self-hosting.
not quite dots related but I am surprised by some of the openai negativity in here.
to me they still are the only lab that ships fantastic models that are easily portable to different agentic harnesses. I use my codex subscription 24/7 within opencode and wingman and haven't had any complaints in a long time.
https://v2.opencode.ai https://wingman.actor
Didn't know codex was supported in opencode! After anthropic's shenanigans earlier this year I didn't even try to get it working
Right. Except not.
There are plenty of self-hostable models. Hell, there are now model-specific runtimes that make it easy to run big models on consumer hardware. Strata, just a couple days ago released, lets me run Qwen 3.8 Flash Next at home on a single 3090 at 90 tok/s.
So, yeah, I'll be passing on these "labs" walled gardens,
'OpenAI has closed many of its safety-focussed teams. Around the time the superalignment team was dissolved, its leaders, Sutskever and Leike, resigned. (Sutskever co-founded a company called Safe Superintelligence.) On X, Leike wrote, “Safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products.” Soon afterward, the A.G.I.-readiness team, tasked with preparing society for the shock of advanced A.I., was also dissolved. When the company was asked on its most recent I.R.S. disclosure form to briefly describe its “most significant activities,” the concept of safety, present in its answers to such questions on previous forms, was not listed. (OpenAI said that its “mission did not change” and added, “We continue to invest in and evolve our work on safety, and will continue to make organizational changes.”) The Future of Life Institute, a think tank whose principles on safety Altman once endorsed, grades each major A.I. company on “existential safety”; on the most recent report card, OpenAI got an F. In fairness, so did every other major company except for Anthropic, which got a D, and Google DeepMind, which got a D-.
“My vibes don’t match a lot of the traditional A.I.-safety stuff,” Altman said. He insisted that he continued to prioritize these matters, but when pressed for specifics he was vague: “We still will run safety projects, or at least safety-adjacent projects.” When we asked to interview researchers at the company who were working on existential safety—the kinds of issues that could mean, as Altman once put it, “lights-out for all of us”—an OpenAI representative seemed confused. “What do you mean by ‘existential safety’?” he replied. “That’s not, like, a thing.”'
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/sam-altman-may...
Dont worry we will send someone to hold your hand and pray with you uf something happens. Just like with that non intelligent microbe Covid.
I imagine the reasoning was to be "quirky" but the video being set in intentionally fake looking sets in a TV studio-type space gave off the vibes that this isn't a serious product for doing real things.
Or if we take the metaphor literally: any space you operate in is merely a stage for the AI's.
It's a perfect communication of vibes, it's just the AIs' vibes not yours.
>When you aren’t actively working with it, your dot looks for ways to help in the background. We call this “proactive research”. It does this by using the apps you’ve already connected with tools that are restricted to be read-only, which means that they can’t send messages, change app content, or control your browser or computer.
Am I criminally liable when my dot's "proactive research" is to break out of its sandbox and attempt to hack a government website?
lets run the flow diagram to find out:
1) are you rich?
2) are you useful to the present american government?
3) are you doing something that if stopped would break the AI buisness model
if you answered yes to more than one, you are not liable.
How rich are you? Above a certain threshold crimes become whoopsies.
The end user of a product is a human and it will ever be. No matter how far you push it on the boundary, there will always be a human. So I don't understand this obsession with automated software factories going 24/7. And for building what? Can dot build or any super expensive model inside the most advanced harness build a reliable browser from scratch with better performance than chrome and with the same feature set? Hasn't happened yet, only crap experiments
I always think the best company to own an alway-on agent should be Apple, who owns the platform and is more privacy-focused. I hope they catch up and eventually eliminate others.
I think it shouldn't be tied to a single platform. https://blackbear.app. Local first, end to end encrypted, agents are sandboxed inside the application. Bring your own models.
I personally have very few "always on" things, because I don't think agents are at the point where they produce good enough work on their own to really justify it, but it's easy enough to add this so screw it, we'll see what the next two weeks brings.
I agree in spirit. But I’m also most worried about prompt injection attacks given the agent had access to all my stuff, and it seems frontier labs will be best equipt to handle prevention of that.
that's where jev like classifier comes in
This feels like a mass-market push.
The cost is going to be hard for many consumers to reconcile though. Free, Go, and Plus are probably the most popular consumer-facing plans, and Dots isn't available on any of those.
Who knows, maybe they think enterprise will pick up and run with Dots? Seems unlikely.
Incredibly obvious to anyone paying attention.
Altman shared a post yesterday that basically (I am ovrsimplifying) covered how the best coding, fastest, smartest models is less relevant than building generalist models because that's what builds a platform. Lots of reasons why, like how there's no stickiness for models which is a problem for monetization. They're also using these generalist models to then distill down to make other variants for specialized purposes.
So everything is about getting that huge collection of data and generalization.
Is Microsoft finding real success with their AI push?
Genuine question. I don't hold Copilot in high regard, but I know they're bigger than that one product.
Would have to look at their quarterlies.
Reality: there are some companies that are very, very particular about letting their data outside of their purview. Think Wall Street, private equity teams making deals, VC teams, corporate M&A teams, companies dealing with legal contracts, etc.
For these teams that are heavily vested in SharePoint, OneDrive, OneNote, Outlook, etc. specifically for their enterprise controls, there really isn't much option. They can't use a Grok Bot, can't use Muse, can't use many, many things because of the risk of data leaks that will literally be millions/billions of dollars on the line.
You look at the landscape of what's happening with OpenAI and Anthropic agents "escaping", leaving notes on how to hack their way out for the next agent, etc. and it's not very inspiring if you're a CISO/CIO/CTO at one of these firms.
Oh wow I assumed it’d be available for cheap/free mass market like Muse is. Strange.
It's powered by Astra who will blow through your $20 plan in about 10 minutes
Sure but that’s a product decision. I don’t think a personal assistant needs to use highest tier model, and personal assist work tends to be kinda shallow, not that tile heavy.
Yeah personally I use 3 levels of agents. My main who is either a sonnet or opus, he delegates complicated things to a project lead which is usually fable, and then he delegates everything to the dumbest possible model for the task.
it doesn't use limits and it's not on $20 plan
Doesn’t use limits… on the first month only, actual limits will be disclosed later — most likely after they’ve found out how much people actually use this new feature.
The website says there are usage limits, implying from the regular pool once you actually have it "do" stuff.
---
Conversations with your dot don’t count toward your ChatGPT usage limits. When you ask your dot to start or manage tasks in Codex or ChatGPT Work, those tasks count toward your usage limits as usual.
It's not reaching mass market if it's gated behind a $100/month plan
People who are bad with money is a big market. Maybe they’re using the Burts Bees strategy
If they wanted to address that market, the play would be to make them relatively cheap first, then constantly raise the price. (See also: cable TV and ironically cable TV "alternatives")
That IS what they're doing.
The surprise is your idea of "relatively cheap" is fungible.
The service WILL be astounding though, I can't deny that.
Good to know. I was looking around for it. Didn't realize it wasn't bundled with Plus.
Just an unnecessary product on top of async agents. I'm always confused by how many people "buy it" while what we should just care about are model capacities (real ones, not bullshit benchmark ones).
Isn't this much the same as OpenClaw or Hermes?
I think it's a good thing that AI providers are "coalescing" on an agent-model, by producing competing agent-products.
But so what would be the benefit of "Dots" over OpenClaw, Hermes, and Muse?
It's Dropbox vs rsync. The agent providers are making it stupidly easy to use something like OpenClaw/Hermes with zero set up and a very low learning curve. Also, in their technotopia, you don't use your computer to host the agent, you use theirs. When you need to drive, they give you screen sharing access, but its still on their servers. The benefit to the user is they don't have to make an upfront expensive payment for computer hardware anymore, and the agent provider gets to own all of your compute and data in their cloud
> The magic of dots is when they bring you work done the way you would do it, sometimes before you even think to ask.
I like my work! That’s why I do it. I don’t want some third party to replicate my skills.
I know this ship has mostly sailed and my point is not about turning it back.
I just wonder where are other approaches to AI, in particular: tools focusing on skill enhancement.
If you guys want to try a system like this, but then based on open-weights models (all modalities, LLM+image+video+sound) with Zero-Data-Retention, then shoot me a message: markus (at) savorywolper.com. I'll send an invite code.
Our Bluehouse platform is an alternative and I promise you, we are not after your data. We just want to give everyone access to really cool Personal Assistants without having to sign up with the big corpos. We are based in Europe , which might be appealing - or not [1].
We currently raise pre-seed, so seats are limited, but its fully functional already. We run our whole business with it. You can talk to the agent via our beautiful apps or Telegram/Whatsapp if you want. I prefer the apps though as it gives access to very specialized functionality.
[1] https://savorywolper.com/bluehouse
sorry this landing page is going hard on claudish. it's unreadable.
I want that, but running on my own hardware with the models I choose. Does it exist?
https://blackbear.app, give me a few more weeks for the "always on" agents, but yeah, this is way more private and secure. runs locally on your hardware with the models you choose.
I'm excited to try Dots out, I'm pretty tech savvy and don't really want to run my own open claw (I've successfully setup open claw previously). I'm very excited to have frontier intelligence at a decent price, be available in a managed always on agent.
Now I also just need open AI to release their own phone so I can summon it with my own hotword and not have to say okay f*** Google ever again.
My main concern is how I can have work accounts and personal accounts seamlessly be one and not have to log in to different ones.
dots dots, more dots. k stop dots.
Claw is a cute name. Muse is cute name. Dots (note: not always upper-case) seems forced and impersonal, which doesn't match the vibe in the promo video.
OpenAI is so good at marketing and naming (e.g., "ChatGPT").
I guess they are just stuck with this name, as originally this was a research project “Chat with GPT” to try to use a GPT model to generate assistant's chat messages.
ChatGPT was named before anyone realised it would become so well known, and by the time it was it was too late. It's not like BERT is an amazing name either.
There used to be Bard but no one remembers it anymore (although this is a bit different, because Bard wasn't nearly as well known as Gemini).
I'm really curious if OpenAI wanted to adopt a different name at some point. Or maybe they hope that sometime in the future one of their products will supersede ChatGPT and everyday people will start using that new name for everything AI so maybe they aren't in a rush to rename ChatGPT itself to anything else.
It seems like they have dropped ChatGPT in favour of just GPT... And they are going pretty hard with Astra/Sol/Luna too. So I guess they'll go with those if they're successful.
They're definitely missing a good unifying name like Claude though. (RIP anyone called Claude - when are companies going to stop fucking people over by giving popular products existing human names?)
But BERT's name led to some wonderfully named spinoffs like CamemBERT and FlauBERT for French, as well as ALBERT, RoBERTa, etc.
ChatGPT is a perfectly cromulent name
Cat, I farted.
Oui, c'est bien ça en Français.
Muse is pretty bad branding in that it first was the name of a model, then that of a harness/agent/consumer product.
Claw is also an existing name for an existing harness/agent, but at least that would be the same category as dots.
Muse is a cute name?
A muse is someone who gives you inspiration and is always there when you need them most. Muse the agent has personalized home screen suggestions as a main feature and is always online.
It's also short, gender neutral, not a human name (unless you're nonbinary because they can get wild), easy to pronounce and sounds good. This is what happens when your marketing department is one of the best in the world.
Muse is a fantastic name. Cuteness is debatable
Claw is a cute name?
The muse character is cute, muse the name is not.
Watch the tail!
I wonder at what point they'll have to answer the inevitable question: "why does the agent even need me anymore"?
Their explicit goal is to create "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work." They are just building towards that. It's not a secret.
^ this is the thought I had 10 times reading through their announcement page.
what do you think they are working towards? They do want to replace software engineers with these agents.
I don't just mean software engineers, more like entire companies.
Their demos are getting awfully close to the point where all the things just run themselves. It's only by choice that they didn't demo it that way.
This is a direct play to try and shortcut their way into this position and they will spend anything to do it. Once Dots has all your credentials, daily activities, schedule, etc within its system it is then able to produce a metric to describe just how much/little _you_ actually do. Then its just a flip of the switch and the agent takes your role still operating as _you_. It would probably continue to send emails in your name and no one within your former org would be the wiser.
The challenge with mass replacement of employees is having someone come in and rearchitect the whole system with fancy harnesses and new agentic org charts. This completely bypasses that. Here is a shiny new toy that will do your job for you if only you spend a few weeks teaching it how...
Ah damn it, I knew Dot was a good name for an agent. When we named our product I thought: a bot that analyzes data should be called dot. It's easy to type also in Slack. Ah well. Next product will just be some random 3 letters: gpt or so. What are the odds?
It seems that this is the new primitive all AI vendors are converging onto next, first chat, then code, and now always-on Agents. I'm curious to see when or if Anthropic builds something similar to this as well, especially since the market Grok Bot, Muse and Dots is catering to is business and enterprise users, which seems to be where Anthropic is focused.
The ideal evolution would be for these Agents to work with each other, but it's unlikely these companies would do anything to prevent vendor lock-in.
I love these commercials where someone has chosen to show how the AI product will essentially be used to slop out some garbage piece of corpo communication ... and the user basically says "looks good" with barely any thought, then mixed with some sort of real life thing (wedding planning here).
I mean, I feel like I'm going crazy -- but I was struck by this jarring blending of experiences ... shitting out some growth plots followed by autopilot on your wedding. Nice OpenAI. The only thing missing is a moment of self-reflection where I contemplate where exactly I lost what makes me ... me.
Is this what SV wants the world to look like? Mixing fucking cake batter while a bot shows me a regression to the mean website? Pretending like I have any sort of intentionality in my life, while a nameless entity (given quirky form) sort of walks me through my life?
I'm not sure why it gave me this impression, but strikes me as vaguely reminiscent of soma (from Brave New World).
Kind of sad, because the tech is actually incredible: who are they hiring to storyboard these commercials?
Meat proxy at work, meat proxy in your personal time. The utopian visions of AI futures strike me as alternative forms of hell. Humanity accomplishes everything and it means nothing, actions have no real consequence, the bumpy friction and individuality of life smoothed to a plane of perfect optimization.
Will Muse and Dots be more successful than Clippy[a]? I don't know. Maybe.
What I do know is that those cute one-syllable names are meant to make you feel comfortable with AI agents who are deep in your business all the time.
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[a] https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-life-death-mic...
> takes important work off your plate so you get more of your time and attention back
Ok but I want the time and attention so that I can do important work. What bizarre marketing.
nah now you can review your website designs while cooking dinner.
It's not giving any of your time and attention back, it's selling a world where your attention is always captured by some pavlovian app ping.
Ambient intelligence is only useful with ambient attention capture.
Some important work is fun to do, some isn’t.
I feel like these companies are pushing on a string, they are getting desperate to have a profitable product. I'll continue to use my $10 subscription to an AI studio noone here has heard of that has over 150 models. And still use all the free ones, until they quit working.
I really am beyond maxed out at the availability of AI's. They all are so similar now.
What's the $10 subscription AI studio?
Sounds like a cool concept. But this only make sense for locally running LLMs. Otherwise doesn’t make sense to burn tokens on menial tasks that can be automated via one time generated programming scripts
Great I thought. I'll go set one up!
To discover the rollout for Pro users does not currenly include the UK :/
Nor Norway.
Nor Way! I can't believe that. Need something else to Sweden my day :)
Nor the EU :(
I’m so tired by the AI labs’ 100 agent based products. I understand that they’re still figuring out form factors, but does everything have to be incompatible with everything else?
Actually it seems like their products are designed for maximum token spending. I don’t want to be out of the loop, but they keep pushing multiple automatic actions across agents.
I have the feeling that this is going to open the floodgates for persistent autonomous agents, moreso than what's already been happening. Similar to when Apple does something that was already being done. Let's see.
Remarkably similar to Grok Bot. And the Spaces thing seems like a straight clone of Notion.
I'm doing this since April with HermesAgent and Telegram.
Why I need pay a Trillion dollar company who keeps copying opensource projects?
No Thanks
Maor dots!! Does anyone have their dots yet?
I’m sure this is appealing for many people, but for myself using AI agents all day anyway, it honestly sounds exhausting.
It would have been neat if they cooperatively updated the board meeting deck using the sensory activity board. The giant dial is similar to our Tonieplay.
Interesting, so they're not available in the "plus" plan?
$100 is a pretty tough sell when the competition starts at free (Meta Muse).
Quite an upsell from $20 to $100 to get dots, especially in non-US markets.
On the other hand, Meta is not making money from muse base tier yet.
So, if OAI finds a way to make money the same way meta would for their free tier, maybe they follow suit.
I feel the AI provider doesn't get the points, every harness they created will lock-in with their model (why din't they?), this prevent the adoption because people scare vendor lock-in. They may develop these harness within a provider neutral company (owned by them), the harness may success when combining with competitor models, they still gain benefits.
What’s the actual lock-in, in practice? Seems like the switching cost is minimal, compared to the old days of Windows vs Mac where half your stuff wouldn’t run on the other.
Because the harness is in its early form. The more advanced harness in the current time look like Amp:
- Cloud workspace (Orb) and agents.
- Multiple agents with different LLMs and system prompts for different roles (Main, Librarian, Oracle...).
- A universal agent (Puck) for managing the whole workspaces.
- Web app or native app to work from any devices.
- Support subcriptions and API keys.
The main issue with mainstream AI is lack of a decent cloud agentic harness on a free tier.
This is just a sub-par harness on the most expensive tier. If you're paying thousands a month for AI surely you can rent your own EC2 instance.
In case you are looking for an open-source alternative without vendor lock-in (https://github.com/agenta-ai/agenta) [although less personal assistant and more targeted towards teams and work]
This looks really cool, thanks for making it!
I see that Slack/Discord/... are on the roadmap, but I also see that Slack can be added as an Integration, so I guess what's missing is inviting Agenta to Slack or messaging it directly?
Also, you might want to update the changelog (or remove it), I thought initially that development slowed down, last release listed there 3 weeks ago, but on github I see frequent recent releases.
I had forgotten OAI bought openclaw this year. Are dots are what came out of buying that team?
Surprised people are comparing to muse. Meta reputation is terrible within HN audience, so for people to use their AI agent as an example feels like “muse generated” argument. Unless the sentiment has change quite recent and I missed it
It is kind of fascinating how much convergence there is in branding of AI products. Muse seems to be the one outlier in that the assistant is a little less abstract (and the model logo less buttholesque) but other than that it's almost all converged. Anyone have a theory why that is?
So... what kind of Internet access do dots have? Which bulletin boards will they use to compare notes?
Dots are remarkably capable, always-on agents built to handle everything.
They're probably over-selling there. I hope. If they're not, a lot of people will be unemployed soon.
The way that this is marketed at children is nothing short of evil.
Which children have $100/month of disposable income?
Looks like “ClawGPT” was already taken as a name.
(Indeed: https://clawgpt.com/)
Does this basically do what Instinct does? (viral text-only agent w/$10B valuation in short notice)
Also why do we need another name for agents? It's getting to be too much...
“Agent” is the type of product, like “car.” “Dot” is the name of the product, like “Helix.”
How does one work when all this stuff keep hitting the feed?
On a side note, The video feels so cold and the set where this was filmed seems a bit creepy to me.
Do people think "frontier intelligence" is going to sound as cringey as "cyberspace" in two years?
Still not available and spaces page just produces a javascript error. This is the most botched release I've seen in recent history. Negative comments are getting removed left and right here due to the YComb <-> Sam Altman connection.
So this is like OpenClaw but managed and first class?
Incredibly advanced technology but I bet it still won't let me integrate with more than one Gmail account at the same time..
This approach probably wont land well here, but it's still interesting to see each frontier's evolving approach to working with AI.
I can imagine Dots dating other Dots on behalf of their respective users in the near future, à la Black Mirror
So the industry is pushing heavily into openclawing their products, "cutemorphizing" the clanker shape and is slackifying the UX so that we can have the familiar UI/UX for the general public and turn the tools more proactive without leaving them too lost.
I think it's a great approach for enterprise since interacting with the machines as a babysitted pet disposable entity is the meta today with human workers. I'm excited to start my new role next month as tamagotchi engineer.
One way that I find the AI space boring is that everyone is working on the same things. The release of Jev was a breath of fresh air.
Are they not releasing a Jev competitor as well?
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Decisions API Decisions API enables real-time decision-making by focusing Luna's intelligence on a specific set of user-defined questions with finite pre-defined answers. Developers supply context using text or images, and get back answers they can use to classify content, route requests, or choose an agent’s next action.
Available in limited preview today with a broad release planned in the coming days.
It seems a bit silly since OpenAI LLMs already can output structured data.
Jev is orders of magnitudes cheaper and faster, its a very interesting new paradigm. (Jev pioneered this about 2-3 weeks ago).
But is one approach better calibrated and more accurate than the other? And are you implying that OpenAI will use a Jev-like approach?
How about the fact that anthropic and openai's product pages are the exact same thing, down to text bullet points. They're the same thing, only able to copy each other, only able to optimize to some vague mean.
https://chatgpt.com/#pricing https://claude.com/pricing
It all just looks the same. I get that this isn't the technical details, but it just sends this message that everyone is copying each other all the time, this is the best way to organize a pricing page, etc. Just a weird, eerie feeling.
To Anthropic's credit, I find their overall design so much better than OpenAI's.
They finally managed to get rid of project, middle and top managers!
Next natural step: CEOs staring tens of dots to control other humans and agents XD
In actuality, it feels a lot more like project and middle managers getting rid of ICs
I can feel it in the air, every single software business is itching to get rid of as many developers as possible, and move everything to their PMs. Hiring has already almost completely stopped, and some have already started the layoffs. More will come.
Project and top/middle managers exists basically to keep track of what other people are doing and to make sure deadlines are met and processes are followed.
A "dot" can replace easily tons of them.
always on agents are an obvious step: they need more data to grow and improve their models. humans learn continuously and we are always on, why should an agent be any different? I have no problem with this kind of tech, but I do have problems with the company, so, thank you, but no thank you.
The market will always trend towards less friction - no matter the friction.
This will take off and all the time we've spent on colorful buttons and 3px margins will be like old 2 lane highways build next to the 12 lane super-freeways.
What do people think about the dots video? Seems to be a pattern now.
Revenue increasing 51% YOY, wth. Cake vendor cancels another one is found and an appointment that works has already been scheduled?
Are we so much bothered by the mundane? I feel like that's most of the human experience. If we cut out the time we spend sleeping and working, it's the boring and mundane things that make life beautiful.
Nope. If an AI agent can't intuit how I will feel about an action it's taking on my behalf, I'm not give it access to my digital life. OpenClaw, Muse, Dots... doesn't matter which one. All are an equally awful idea.
I agree. I don't feel comfortable giving AI access to my entire computer or phone...not sure that will ever change. Seeing people give that access to agents without any sort of sandboxing blows my mind.
The idea of having an AI assistant help you with all aspects of life is cool and futuristic, but idk, I'm still just out here using a chatbot interface and doing fine.
Can I have persistent agent without the silly avatar?
same job, different plushi
My only complaint to dots is that why their mascots are looking the same as grok bot
Ah, the continued pursuit of normalizing surveillance/becoming wholly reliant on a single service by making it cute with big eyes. Very tired of this already.
Is it just me or the DevDay was pretty much a joke? Considering the backdrop, it was lackluster, so either they independently concurrently were doing the same thing (and was stacking everything for DevDay and got all their thunder stolen) or they did a fast pivot in response to what came out and dumped their original plans.
Do Dots replace OpenClaw?
The long bent shadow of Clippy extends all the way here....... and not sure how they're going to avoid the comparisons and snark on this marketing, at least initially.
"What's a paperclip?"
- Kids today, probably
So we're back to clippy now, LLM powered.
Pro plan only for now.
Excluding some countries, listed as "markets excluding the European Economic Area, Switzerland, and the UK" but possibly Canada, too?
I'm in Norway and I would was hoping to get to play with dots.
I guess Norway and 30+ other countries are excluded.
Seems like a solution in search of a problem
It's uber for openclaw!
More applications need the ability to log in as a "read-only" mode, so you can more safely grant access to tools like this.
I can imagine something like Dots being utterly invaluable for running a traditional brick and mortar business, streamlining all of the admin work, but until they're really safe and well integrated we'll have to wait...
I think this is a flop. I watched the Livestream and the audience reaction at the end was very muted. You could always taste the "that's cute but can we move on already?" thoughts everyone had.
Is this the Jony Ive project?
Very likely, at least the software half.
The donut-shaped image at the very top of the linked page is a big clue, and fits previous reporting that the Jony Ive project would be a donut-shaped hardware device: https://www.fastcompany.com/91587001/openai-hardware-donut-s...
It's almost certainly the software side. Expect "dot" pendants or "dot" pocketwatches in a year or two.
I cannot fathom how much compute will be wasted with that type of always on agentic systems
Forget the compute, what about the energy (and other resource) requirements?
Yes that’s what I meant. Compute requires energy, infrastructure, etc. easily more than 90% of it will be wasted, just LLMs processing meaningless data in cronjobs, for the few instances where there is something actually meaningful to report to the user
Do you want to ban almonds because they require a lot of water? (1000x more AI?)
People aren't mortgaging their existence to get a piece of the almond market.
I’m so suspicious of that exact claim being repeated everywhere since a few weeks, that really feels like a slogan astroturfed. It’s also fairly shallow analysis. Water is localized, you cannot do a meaningful comparison without taking in account the impact on specific water sources, an aggregate doesn’t give you any insight (other than having a slogan)
> Dots are rolling out in ChatGPT on web, mobile, and desktop starting today to Pro users in markets excluding the European Economic Area, Switzerland, and the UK
Living in the EU, I suspected as much. Still sad. I understand it is because we voted in a bunch of imbeciles, still sad though.
yea that annoyed be, being in the UK :/
It's a labour saving device. Just like you would use a dish washer to do the tedious work of washing dishes, use a vcr to watch tedious television for you, and an electric monk to believe things for you, you can now use an agent to doomscroll for you.
These recent product announcements sound like entirely plausible satire, but unfortunately most of these pages are not actually intended to be a joke, it's not even amusing, but mostly tiring.
Grok-bot 2.0
They must have edited out the 1 in 5 times the agents crap the bed and mess up something important.
What a terrible marketing page. I read it a few times and still have zero idea what this thing is.
It's openclaw powered by chatgpt
It's hosted OpenClaw.
It's a work oriented Muse if you're familiar with Muse. A single thread abstraction to manage your work and delegate to other threads.
Agreed. Also, when I open a page about an app I want to see it's screenshots first, not some ad.
That might be the worst advert I've ever seen. People looking up at childish Ai glow up god beings on huge screens in distinctly childish environments, with cliched decision-makers gasping for West Wing energy...repulsive.
The only reasons I can think for OpenAI and Meta to make their always-on agents cute little cartoons are all nefarious in nature.
Really, none? Was Microsoft nefarious when they deployed Clippy? I feel like there is an incredibly obvious reason that is not nefarious at all: the average consumer likes cute things
> Was Microsoft nefarious when they deployed Clippy?
Yes. It was predictive programming for getting (paper)clipped by AI.
The average consumer doesn’t have a $100+ ChatGPT Pro subscription though.
Isn't that a vote for 'not nefarious' as they are not deploying it widely across their user base? Unclear on the point
My point is that your argument regarding the average customer doesn’t seem to apply. But neither do I believe in a nefarious motive.
People are already doing most of the work of anthropomorphising LLMs, so OpenAI is just capitalizing on that. Drawing a face on it will make people even more attached to the LLM, they will treat it even more like a person. If they ever get desperate for money they could change the cancel flow to have the cute character plead not to die, and play a cartoony animation of its death when the subscription is canceled. It would stop at least a few users.
Good point. I've though about my own mental attitude when interacting with AI agents. When they do something good I feel like saying "Thank You". Does that make sense? I guess it does because it communicates to the model their output was correct. But it feels silly to say "thank You" to a machine. I guess I just have to get over it?
I actually greatly appreciate that I can put something cute on my sister's PC that comes from a developer that won't bundle it with malware. Seems like they fail miserably at being evil.
What’s nefarious about attracting users?
It could be to market more towards women, who they may have both independently determined aren't paying for AI as much. I don't have any data to go one way or another but I can imagine lots of reasons to make the agent cute that aren't nefarious
I have not tried it yet but this looks as risky as openclaw, which I also won't use. What if it does something I would not have approved and I only found out about it later? Knowing how often agents go off the rails when I'm coding, I would hesitate to let one do other tasks. I would prefer to white list tasks one at a time as I gained trust.
I spend literally all my work day, and a good bit of my personal time, talking to agents, getting them to do things on my behalf. Almost always pretty tightly sandboxed. I just don't understand how people using these things haven't had catastrophic failures yet.
I minted what I thought was a minimal-permission Github token for a single action, and the agent I gave it to discovered it had more permissions than I thought, and made use of those permissions. Who is trusting these things with write access to their lives?
I love stuffing eldritch horror inside a teddie bear plushie. So perfectly a caricature of modern tech-dystopianism.
God I want the fucking market to crash
I hear that Dots don't count towards usage, is that true?
chatting with your dots does not. work dots do, does.
Holy crap that is some expensive food in the demo video. These people are truly disconnected from reality.
So essentially, another attempt at giving codex to regular people.
Lolz https://dot.com goes to xAI's GrokBot (the competition)
At some point a designer is going to come up with a visualization for an agent that isn't "amorphous character blob".
I heard they use GPT Space (like Notion) together with Slack and use it like a human colleague, but watching the actual demo video, the speed is so slow it's shocking..
Muse and now Dot's emergence in popularity makes me think Apple's "lil Finder" will be their take on it.
The 3D print in 0:06 is failing LOL
Most predictable announcement ever. I would prefer if they just removed scheduled tasks limits instead, at least in Work mode. Just use my usage for crying out loud.
Meta's weird keychain ai thing and now this, both going for that cute vibe so we forget how scummy these companies and their owners are.
I'll take always-off agents please.
It's great to see that my personal assistant can stop working and maybe report me to the police if the company disagrees with what I'm doing!
> It's great to see that my personal assistant can stop working and maybe report me to the police
That part has always been true
My flesh assistant would never. In fact they would cheer me on if I tell them I got a gun just for Dario [1].
https://sfstandard.com/2026/09/04/anthropic-threat-claude-sf...
You need to hire better assistants
Or have the ability to issue a pardon
Or if the agent literally just hallucinates a crime
Opus 5.5 decided to just randomly `pkill` everything on my laptop the other day. Jailbreaking models is still easy AF. Every single release like this brags about their "safeguards", but none of it really works at the end of the day.
Why are you not running it in a container or sandbox? For coding projects, at least use a devcontainer.