OpenAI unveils Dots agent to challenge Meta's Muse, but free access sets the bar

CEO Sam Altman announced Dots onstage to cheers, describing it as a “real-deal AI” agent “inspired by the cool agents that we all watched in movies growing up.” Like Muse, Dots is designed for disarming cuteness, taking the form of colorful, personalizable blobs with eyes. OpenAI also demonstrated that Dots can build metaverse-esque virtual worlds, not just act as a helpful assistant.

Muse’s main selling point is making AI agent access free and frictionless. Meta offers a free dedicated virtual machine that houses both the agent and the user’s associated data. OpenAI’s Dots, by contrast, is restricted for now to users on its $20-a-month Pro plan and up. While anyone with a Meta account can get Muse, most of ChatGPT’s 1.2 billion users will not be able to use Dots.

The reason is financial. OpenAI likely cannot afford to offer Dots free, The Verge reported. The AI lab is reportedly aiming to raise $30 billion in funding at a $1.4 trillion valuation, according to Bloomberg, and it has experienced 70 percent growth since the beginning of its third quarter, nearing $70 billion in annual recurring revenue, Axios reported. Despite that financing, its funds are not limitless, particularly compared with a tech giant like Meta. In the past year, some users have accused AI labs of passing costs on to customers amid an AI money squeeze. OpenAI expects to spend $280 billion by 2030, per the FT, and compute is expensive, while it also faces pressure from investors to button up its bottom line ahead of going public.

“Dots are starting out as a premium product — it uses a lot of compute,” Altman said Tuesday during a private press Q&A after his DevDay keynote, adding, “I think it will help us understand and help people understand how expansive and what AI can do. But you should of course expect us to do a mass-market thing for billions of people someday.”

During DevDay, OpenAI took pains to explain why Dots are worth the money, positioning the agent as not just a capable personal assistant but a “chief of staff” or experienced engineer. OpenAI employee Holly Li told the audience that using a Dot was “like talking to a second brain.” Altman said Dots were built for delegating “ambitious pieces of work,” such as QA for an unreleased product, website design, team offsite trip planning, portfolio rebalancing, and email campaign creation. “Specialist” Dots trained for areas like accounting and legal analysis are supposed to launch soon, and the company is working with Microsoft to integrate them into its Agent 365 platform.

When asked during the press Q&A how Dots is different from Muse and Instinct, another popular new AI agent, Thibault Sottiaux, OpenAI’s head of core products, said it is “capable of actually staying on track in very long periods of time.” He added that the multimodality of Dots, which will allow chatting with an agent via text or voice mode and phone call, will feel like “an incredible extension of you.” The voice demos of Dots did not work at DevDay, though, and although OpenAI leaders highlighted the texting-your-agent feature multiple times at the conference, that feature — already supported by Muse and Instinct — is still slated as coming soon.

Altman said during the Q&A that long-horizon and knowledge-work tasks set Dots apart, adding, “I think this is far beyond anything else available on the market today.” He said the agents’ help with triaging to-do lists and supporting employees at work would be “difficult for economists to measure right away” but would hopefully make a “huge difference” in how people feel about their jobs.

Framing Dots as a professional tool differentiates it from Muse and could help OpenAI gain ground against Anthropic in the enterprise market. Anthropic has focused on — and dominated in — enterprise AI for years, but OpenAI has devoted more resources to the area over the past year. OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar told CNBC that the company’s enterprise business had doubled since July.

OpenAI leaders also tried to promote Dots as safer and more secure, particularly compared with Muse; the report names Codex product lead Alexander Embiricos in that section.

Editor's Summary

OpenAI announced Dots, a GPT-6 Astra agent, at DevDay, positioning it as a professional tool to challenge Meta’s free Muse and to compete with Anthropic in enterprise AI. Dots is limited to ChatGPT Pro subscribers at $20 a month and up, while Meta offers Muse free with a dedicated virtual machine. OpenAI’s funding needs, compute costs and investor pressure shape its premium strategy, with Altman saying a mass-market version may come someday.