OpenAI turns coding tools into dots, an always-on personal assistant

Alexander Embiricos, who leads OpenAI's enterprise product team, described the product's origins at TechCrunch Disrupt this month. He said the company found that framing the assistant as a single entity in a single conversation, rather than as many separate chats, made the experience more intuitive.

Once connected to a user's calendar, email, computer and other tools, dots tries to help with work. Embiricos said much of dots' functionality could already be achieved with OpenAI's Codex coding app, released at the beginning of the year, but that approach requires more work and hand-holding. He recalled celebrating when his wife began leaving her computer on all night so her agents could keep working.

The path from chatbot to coding tool to personal assistant involved repackaging model capabilities into something more accessible, a route OpenAI was already taking as it spun ChatGPT Work out of the agentic coding tools it had built for engineers. The name is a play on the negative space inside OpenAI's logo and is meant to feel like something that could eventually be ubiquitous, Embiricos said. Asked when he learned that rival AI entrepreneur Elon Musk owns the dot.com URL, he said: 'I found out very late.'

The idea of a persistent agent is that it does not need prompting. For OpenAI, that means more token usage; for users, Embiricos said, it means a more proactive assistant 'that's sort of thinking about you and thinking how to help you.'

In TechCrunch's testing, the assistant's ability to think ahead was apparent and often useful, but it was not fully there yet. It flagged calendar conflicts and upcoming deadlines, though not always in the most timely fashion. Embiricos recalled that during early development, dots told him about a conflict three minutes before it began. 'It's like, Hey, this thing is coming up. You might want to do something about it. I only have three minutes!' he said.

Embiricos expects timing to improve. He cited an engineer at a drone delivery startup who said that during an outage, the engineer's dot noticed the outage before the engineer did, analyzed it and brought useful information on how to resolve it.

Dots also raises questions about how much personal data an agent needs. Meta's Muse has been criticized for profiles it builds of users' family and friends, which the software uses to know, for example, what kind of restaurant a user might want to visit with a specific friend, but which could also add value to Meta's advertising business. Embiricos said dots has a feature called proactive research. 'On a cadence, it will think about what it knows about you, what is the conversation that it's had, and then what have you given it access to that it can think about, and then it will go and research, What could I do to be more helpful to you? And then, basically, it will propose that,' he said.

Hark, a startup developing its own AI personal assistant, says explicitly that it does not collect data to fuel an advertising business the way OpenAI and Meta do. OpenAI says dots has the same privacy controls as ChatGPT itself: users can turn off model training, which stops OpenAI from using their conversations to improve its AI, according to the company.