OpenAI launches dots, an always-on assistant in ChatGPT

OpenAI's dots arrives after the startup Instinct became an overnight sensation with an always-on assistant and Meta put the full force of its marketing behind its own assistant, Muse. OpenAI had already been repackaging the agentic coding tools it built for software engineers, spinning ChatGPT Work out of them, and dots extends that path to a broader audience. According to Alexander Embiricos, who leads OpenAI's enterprise product team, much of the product work was not new technology but framing: presenting the assistant as a single entity in a single conversation so it feels intuitive. The name itself, a play on the negative space inside OpenAI's logo, is meant to feel like something that could eventually be ubiquitous. Embiricos acknowledged that much of dots' functionality could be achieved with OpenAI's Codex app, released at the beginning of this year, but that requires more work and hand-holding. In testing, the assistant's ability to think ahead is apparent and often useful, but it isn't quite there yet, flagging calendar conflicts and deadlines not necessarily in the most timely fashion. Embiricos recalled an early development version telling him about a conflict three minutes before it happened. The proactive approach is key to the product: he described an engineer at a drone delivery startup whose dot noticed an outage, analyzed it and came with useful information before the engineer had noticed. On data, Embiricos said dots includes a feature called proactive research that on a cadence thinks about what it knows about the user and proposes ways to be more helpful. OpenAI says the agent has the same privacy controls as ChatGPT, though Embiricos said the company needs to build out super granular controls. He also noted that OpenAI had conservative defaults at launch that asked for permission a lot, and said that can be tuned over time. On scaling, Embiricos said OpenAI is not always the fastest at shipping new abilities for agents to work with the world, and that when it does, it works closely with the rest of the ecosystem, adding that OpenAI is deep in conversations with payment processors. He also said he personally never intends to have a meeting with someone else's agent.