Dots: Always-on agents

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.

> AI companies are bad at making software

They should try using agents. I hear they can write great software.

> 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.

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".

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.

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

They're just trying things. It's not a conspiracy to "distract" anyone.

The bitter lesson

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.

Muse is $0/$16/$80 vs Dot being $100/$200/$500 so yeah I don't think Dot is meant for casuals.

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)

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?

'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...

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!

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 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 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 don't have to give yourself up to irrational, anxious feelings.

Does no one remember the MS Paperclip?!?

Muse makes sense since it targets the general normies. Dots explicitly are targeting developers instead which makes it a bit weird.

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

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.

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.

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. 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

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.

    > ...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.

Very, very likely targeting enterprise

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.

Oh wow I assumed it’d be available for cheap/free mass market like Muse is. Strange.

It's not reaching mass market if it's gated behind a $100/month plan

Good to know. I was looking around for it. Didn't realize it wasn't bundled with Plus.

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.

OpenAI is so good at marketing and naming (e.g., "ChatGPT").

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?

Watch the tail!

Nor Norway.

^ 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.

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.

What's the $10 subscription AI studio?

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.

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.

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.

Which children have $100/month of disposable income?

“Agent” is the type of product, like “car.” “Dot” is the name of the product, like “Helix.”

Are they not releasing a Jev competitor as well?

---

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.

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.

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.

"What's a paperclip?"

- Kids today, probably

Excluding some countries, listed as "markets excluding the European Economic Area, Switzerland, and the UK" but possibly Canada, too?

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 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.

yea that annoyed be, being in the UK :/

Forget the compute, what about the energy (and other resource) requirements?

chatting with your dots does not. work dots do, does.

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.

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

It's openclaw powered by chatgpt

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.

It's hosted OpenClaw.

Agreed. Also, when I open a page about an app I want to see it's screenshots first, not some ad.

> 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

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.