How OpenAI turned its coding tools into dots, an always-on personal assistant — SkimNews
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- OpenAI released dots at its developer day in late September, making the always-on assistant available in ChatGPT desktop and mobile apps to subscribers on the Pro tier or higher, with plans starting at $100 a month.
- dots connects to calendars, email, computers and other tools to pursue work without a new prompt; testing found it flagging conflicts and deadlines, sometimes only three minutes before one conflict.
- Alexander Embiricos said much of dots’s functionality was available through OpenAI’s Codex coding app, released at the beginning of the year, but the assistant packages it as a single persistent conversation requiring less hand-holding.
- dots runs “proactive research” on a cadence, reviewing what it knows, prior conversations and connected resources before proposing ways to help the user.
- dots carries the same privacy controls as ChatGPT, according to OpenAI, including an option to stop model training and controls over computer resources; the current controls are not granular enough, and the app refuses read-only cloud-drive access.
- OpenAI drew criticism after launch for conservative defaults that made dots request permission frequently; Embiricos said those defaults would be tuned over time, but the app can still be pushy.
- OpenAI is in deep discussions with payment processors about letting AI assistants spend money, while Embiricos said new agent capabilities are being developed with close ecosystem collaboration rather than shipped as quickly as possible.
Why it matters: For Pro users starting at $100 a month, dots’s value hinges less on new model capability than on permission to act across email, calendars and computers. Testing found early warnings arriving only three minutes before conflicts, while OpenAI enterprise product lead Alexander Embiricos said the permission controls were not granular enough.
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