OpenAI's Dots Dichotomy

I was pretty excited to watch OpenAI's DevDay yesterday. Inadvertent rogue model hacking issues aside, the company has always been good on the product side of the house. So I really wanted to see their take on AI personal assistants, a space which is having a moment after years of broken promises. Sam Altman wasted no time on stage, about 90 seconds in promising "the thing you've asked for the most" and "a whole new way to work with AI" and "the real deal version of AI". And so?

Honestly, I'm sort of confused.

Dots are your cute, little AI assistant. Emphasis on cute. While technically you can stylized them as an 'O' – albeit a somehow still cute colorful one – or a 'Pet' (a holdover from Codex), the clear emphasis is on the cute, cuddly, colorful faces. They're far more like Microsoft's failed blob thing for Copilot than what Meta is doing with Muse. Actually, they're even more like Grok Bot, which may be the point.

That's fine, cute AI is better than say, "we're going to end the world" AI – though I can't help be yet again be reminded of the smiling-while-being-mischievous Miss Minutes AI from Loki – but it's also a weird contrast to the actual framing OpenAI is conveying here. That is, Dots aren't meant to be the "booking plane ticket" bots, tasks which Altman called "trivial" for such AI, but rather "we wanted to be way more ambitious".