OpenAI Launches Dots, Its Always-On AI Assistant

OpenAI's answer to the always-on assistant race has a name that sounds more like a punctuation mark than a product: dots. The company launched it at its developer day in late September, months after Instinct turned heads as a startup overnight success and Meta poured marketing money into its own assistant, Muse. Dots builds on Codex, the coding tool OpenAI shipped earlier this year, but strips away the friction. Where Codex demands setup and constant direction, dots connects to your calendar, email and computer and starts working without being asked.

Alexander Embiricos, who runs OpenAI's enterprise product team, sat down at TechCrunch Disrupt this month to walk through how the tool came together. The pricing alone signals who it's for: dots is available only to ChatGPT subscribers on the Pro tier, which starts at $100 a month. Embiricos also addressed something harder to quantify than price or features, the growing trend of tech companies dressing up large language models as friendly little characters. He has a theory about why that's happening across the industry, not just at OpenAI.