How OpenAI turned its coding tools into dots, an always-on personal assistant
The always-on AI personal assistant, which keeps working in the background even when you arenāt asking it to, is this yearās answer to the question of how people will actually use deep learning models. The startup Instinct became an overnight sensation, and Meta put the full force of its marketing behind its assistant, Muse. OpenAI wasnāt going to be left out. The companyreleased dots, its assistant offering, at its developer day in late September. Alexander Embiricos, who leads OpenAIās enterprise product team, joined us at TechCrunch Disrupt this month to explain where the product came fromāstarting with the question of why so many companies seem to be turning to cutesy mascots as avatars for their trillion-parameter matrix multiplication machines. āThereās kind of this convergent evolution happening,ā Embiricos said of the efforts to build AI assistants. āAs we were working on the product, we realized if we could frame this as, itās an entity and itās a single conversation, not many different conversationsā¦.it starts to become intuitive.ā The assistant is available in the ChatGPT desktop and mobile apps to subscribers on the Pro tier or higher, with plans starting at $100 a month. Once it is connected to your calendar, email, computer and other tools, the agent tries to help you get your work done. Embiricos points out that you could achieve much of dotsā functionality with Open AIās Codex app, its coding tool, released at the beginning of this year. But that requires more work and hand-holding. He recalled celebrating when his wife started leaving her computer on all night so that her agents could keep working. āOn the product team, what I think about is, how do we make this intuitive and useful to people?ā he told Disrupt attendees. āA lot of that isnāt building some new piece of tech into the product; itās how you frame it to the user and how it feels.ā Making the technology feel intuitive meant repackaging the functionality of the companyās models into something more accessible, a path it was already on as itspun ChatGPT Workout of the agentic coding tools it had built for software engineers. Even the nameāa play on the negative space inside of OpenAIās logoāis intended āto feel like just something that could eventually be ubiquitous.ā (Asked when he learned that rival AI entrepreneur Elon Musk owns the dot.com URL, Embiricos said, āI found out very late.ā) The idea of a persistent agent is that it doesnāt need prompting. For OpenAI, means more token usage, and for users, a more pro-active assistant āthatās sort of thinking about you and thinking how to help you,ā as Embiricos put it. In our testing, the assistantās ability to think ahead is apparent and often useful, but it isnāt quite there yet. It will flag calendar conflicts and upcoming deadlines, but not necessarily in the most timely fashion. āThe first time it told me about one of those [conflicts]āthis is like early in developmentāit told me three minutes before the thing,ā Embiricos says of his dot. āItās like, āHey, this thing is coming up. You might want to do something about it.ā I only have three minutes!ā Embiricos expects the timing to improve over time, but the proactive approach is key to the product. āI was hearing about an engineer at a drone delivery startup, and they were saying, āWe had this outage, and by the time I noticed that the outage was going on, my dot had already noticed the outage was happening, had already analyzed the outage, and had come to me with useful information for how we could resolve the outage.āā As with most AI agent use cases, thereās a tension between the personal information an AI model needs to be useful and exactly how much personal data you are exposing to a software company. Muse has been criticized forthe profiles it buildsof your family and friends, which the software uses to know, say, what kind of restaurant you might want to go to with a specific pal, but could also add incredible value to Metaās advertising business. Does dots collect similar data? āYes, we have a thing that we built into dots, which we call proactive research,ā Embiricos said. āOn a cadence, it will think about what it knows about you, what is the conversation that itās had, and then what have you given it access to that it can think about, and then it will go and research, āWhat could I do to be more helpful to you?ā And then, basically, it will propose that.ā Itās difficult to separate the data needs of the agent from that of its parent corporation. Hark, a start-up developing its own AI personal assistant, is explicit in pointing out it that it doesnāt collect data to fuel an advertising business the way that OpenAI and Meta do. With dots, OpenAI says that the agent has the same privacy controls as ChatGPT itself: Users can turn off model training (stopping OpenAI from using their conversations to improve its AI), and control what resources it accesses within your computer and how. Still, those controls arenāt granular and the app can be pushy. For example, it refuses to accept read-only access to cloud drives. āWhat I think we need to do is basically build out super, super, super granular controls,ā Embiricos said, but he pointed to the modelās intelligence and discretion as the other side of this coin. āThis is actually something we kind of got some flack about when we launched,ā Embiricos said. āWe had really conservative defaults over what the agent would do, and it would ask for permission a lot. I remember knowing that we were going to see that feedback, but thinking, āThis is okay, we can tune that over time.āā The other big question about AI agents is whether they can scale. Theyāre fun when only a few people have them, and stories of agents snagging hard-to-get reservations abound. But businesses donāt necessarily like dealing with agents and might not be equipped to. People certainly donāt like dealing with them (note: stop having your AI agents pitch me), and Embiricos is among those people. He also has a human assistant because OpenAIās corporate partners want to interact with a person, he said, adding, āI personally never intend to have a meeting with someone elseās agent.ā If the AI industry is right that agents are our future, can we get there without overwhelming the infrastructure that our world currently runs on, from businesses and websites to payment networks? āAt OpenAIā¦weāre not always moving the fastest in terms of shipping the next ability for the agent to work with the world,ā he said. āWhen we do, weāre doing it really closely in collaboration with the rest of the ecosystem. I probably canāt say too much here, but weāre deep in lots of conversations with payment processors.ā Letting an AI assistant spend money through partnerships with payment companies would be a potentially lucrative first for OpenAI, but also a big ask for consumers. Giving an assistant access to my email inbox already feels like a big ask, but my bank account is off limits. For now.
