Sam Altman unveils "dots," OpenAI's new AI personal agent

OpenAI unveiled a personal AI agent at its annual developer conference on Tuesday, joining a growing number of companies promising to make consumers' lives easier with virtual assistants.

The company's new AI agents, called "dots," will help perform workplace and other tasks such as scheduling meetings, making travel arrangements, budgeting, debugging computer systems and writing software code. The agents run on GPT‑6 Astra, a new model OpenAI released earlier this month.

"It's like an AI helper that always has your back, inspired by the cool versions of what we all watched in movies growing up," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said during a keynote address at DevDay, OpenAI's annual developers conference in San Francisco.

"You can delegate ambitious pieces of work the way you would to a high agency engineer or a chief of staff that you work with," he added.

Competing agents

In a short demo on Tuesday, a member of OpenAI's product team played up the agents' workplace capabilities, explaining how they can integrate into companies' Slack and Teams channels to help workers brainstorm ideas, update calendars and review customer feedback. 

Users can access dots through OpenAI's ChatGPT platform, Altman said, adding that in the future, people will be able to converse with the agents by phone and text. In a blog post, the company described dots as "always-on agents built to handle everything."