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 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).
The Bitter Lesson is significantly more interesting than watching researcher companies cosplay at ...whatever you call what they're claiming to be doing.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
'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.”'
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!
>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?
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.
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.
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.
> ...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.
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.
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")
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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..
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
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.
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
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitter_lesson
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.
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?
God I want the fucking market to crash
- non-developer
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
“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...
Am I criminally liable when my dot's "proactive research" is to break out of its sandbox and attempt to hack a government website?
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.
$100 is a pretty tough sell when the competition starts at free (Meta Muse).
It's a perfect communication of vibes, it's just the AIs' vibes not yours.
They're probably over-selling there. I hope. If they're not, a lot of people will be unemployed soon.
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.
To discover the rollout for Pro users does not currenly include the UK :/
(Indeed: https://clawgpt.com/)
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.
---
[a] https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-life-death-mic...
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.
Claw is also an existing name for an existing harness/agent, but at least that would be the same category as dots.
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'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.
I really am beyond maxed out at the availability of AI's. They all are so similar now.
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 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.
Ok but I want the time and attention so that I can do important work. What bizarre marketing.
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.
Also why do we need another name for agents? It's getting to be too much...
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.
---
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.
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.
Next natural step: CEOs staring tens of dots to control other humans and agents XD
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.
- Kids today, probably
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 guess Norway and 30+ other countries are excluded.
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.
Yes. It was predictive programming for getting (paper)clipped by AI.
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.
That part has always been true
https://sfstandard.com/2026/09/04/anthropic-threat-claude-sf...
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.