Comment by bluelightning2k
5 days ago
I must be getting dumber as I get older. I genuinely can't work out what Dots actually is.
It seems like a dumbed down reskin of Codex/ChatGPT Work but with the power-user features e.g. visibility/mentions removed. As a serious engineer why would I want that? Then the word agent becomes dot.
It also seems to be running a VM so the agent has its own computer.
I guess the intent was to pull together the Codex, claw and ChatGPT Work paradigms and simplify them?
>As a serious engineer why would I want that?
Take off your "engineering" hat and put on your "normie" hat...
OpenAI's Dots, Meta's Muse, xAI's Grok Bot, etc are trying to target non-technical people and give them "24/7 AI personal assistants". Apple is also pursuing this angle by adding more features to the new Siri (partnership with Google-Gemini).
Perspective of product and market : we need our AI to be more deeply intertwined with customers lives instead of just being on-demand chatbot Q&A sessions. The "sticky" product to create this customer relationship is "AI personal assistants". Instead of just providing "answers" (chatbots) -- provide "completed tasks" (AI assistant).
Perspective of technical predecessors and concepts overlap : OpenClaw and Hermes self-hosted software on Mac minis and Linux boxes as "personal assistants" is geared for techies instead of normies. Instead, repackage those types of tools for normal people in cloud VMs to be hosts for "long-lived agents". Zero install required.
I’d disagree with this being targeted toward normies. Reread the release. The first demographic in their copy is toward developers:
“ Turn feedback into tested fixes You’re a developer working on an app. Your dot watches customer feedback for recurring requests, scopes smaller improvements and bugfixes, builds and tests them, and brings you complete PRs to review with attached videos showing the changes.”
>I’d disagree with this being targeted toward normies. Reread the release. The first demographic in their copy is toward developers
I'm using "normies" to describe people who are not developers and they would not install something like OpenClaw on a Mac mini.
E.g. the OpenAI's 2-minute marketing video for Dot trying to show non-developers using AI assistants to get tasks done: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXspbC2srEQ
A man wants his website changed, and a woman wants her presentation slides updated. "Serious engineers" don't need cutesy re-incarnated mascots of Microsoft's Bob or MS Office Clippy paperclip assistants. OpenAI dots doesn't have to win over HN techies who are comfortable with CLI tools.
Thanks, great perspective and explanation.
Have you considered using a Telemetry Blocklist (free) to block these agents from phoning home?
You'd have to block the conversation itself for that to be meaningful. Which would lead to a not very useful conversation.
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> It also seems to be running a VM so the agent has its own computer.
Probably this.
> I guess the intent was to pull together the Codex, claw and ChatGPT Work paradigms and simplify them?
Probably this in part, too. They're trying to figure out how to decouple agent lifetime from conversation lifetime, without accidentally making it too useful for end users.
I noticed in the past that tooling - both for AI and in general - tends to miss the features that would make it most useful. Like, look how long did it take for the AI vendors to supported "scheduled runs", and they're still offering only toy-level configuration for that[0]. Wonder how many years it'll take to allow users to configure external triggers, and whether it'll be sooner than forced re-authentication will become frequent enough to make the feature useless in the first place.
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[0] - I understand they don't want users to run this too often, or to accidentally end up spawning a job every 10 minutes - but with limits on frequency in place, there is otherwise no good reason for this to be a limited dropdown, instead of the "repeats every" configuration that every calendar app and phone app already uses.
Agent that has its own computer, plugins to connect it to various services and probably it's own memory. A virtual personal assistant. You could have different specialized Dots each with its own plugins, memory and instructions.
That's how I understand it.
Cloud compute means its work VM is isolated from your devices, so it can't destroy your local data as easily (unless it has access to your devices) and it's on 24/7. A big negative is that you are giving access to even more of your services and data to a third party and the lock-in into a walled garden happens once you start depending on it.
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90% of the {muse,grokbot,instinct,dots,...} fuss is just that your {aunt,cousin,neighbor's dad} probably doesn't have a good codex or claude code setup, and probably does not have a great local machine to run them from anyway.
So everyone is trying to give the aunts, cousins, neighbor's dads some of the agent capabilities that developers have been closer to.
That said, there's the other 10% here that is not necessarily new capability unlocks vs codex, but general product experience that can have some benefit to people already used to what the latest models can do
> So everyone is trying to give the aunts, cousins, neighbor's dads some of the agent capabilities
Why do they want it? What are some use cases that make sense?
I'd assume it pulls at the very human desire to do less so you can spend your time as you want. Collectively, we are really good at making systems we don't understand and still have to exist in this world: Laws, taxes, internet check outs, etc. This is trying to flatten the curve between desire and result for things someone genuinely doesn't want to or doesn't have the time to become an expert in.
It’s an agent that’s always-on and can do things proactively. It’s not an app so it’s not limited by your device.
To boil it down I think it's basically one 'orchestrator' chat, so you don't manage multiple chats, and it proactively reaches out to you to update you on how your other chats are going. In the presentation they mentioned a "Chief of Staff".
It's not intended for coding.
It looks to me like subtle marketing for the doughnut-shaped hardware from Jony Ive that comes next. All these 3D-printed avatars we see at 00:12 are shaped to have the doughnut Dots inside them.
This is basically like OpenClaw but for the general public.
it's basically their answer to the cool gamified version grok has
it’s a headless agent in the cloud that you can task with long running jobs
think of things that need rvent handlers or web hooks
OpenClaw but from OpenAI.