At OpenAI’s annual DevDay conference, the company pulled out all the stops to compete with rivals, primarily Meta, whose Muse AI agent platform has been wildly successful. CEO Sam Altman took the stage to cheers and announced Dots, a “real AI” agent powered by GPT-6 Astra, “inspired by the cool agents we all watched in movies growing up.” Similar to Muse, Dots aims for disarming cuteness, taking the form of colorful, customizable blobs with eyes. OpenAI took a shot at Meta by demonstrating Dots’ ability to not only act as useful assistants, but also create metaverse-like virtual worlds. But in one key area Dots fails to compete: price.
Muse’s main selling point is making access to AI agents free and frictionless. The company offers a free dedicated virtual machine that hosts both the agent and the user’s associated data. OpenAI’s Dots, on the other hand, is currently reserved for users on its Pro plan at $20/month and above. While anyone with a Meta account can get Muse, most of ChatGPT’s 1.2 billion users won’t be able to use Dots.
There’s an obvious reason for this: OpenAI probably can’t afford it. The AI lab is currently reportedly aiming to raise $30 billion in funding, at a valuation of $1.4 trillion, per Bloombergand it has seen growth of 70% since the start of its third quarter, representing nearly $70 billion in annual recurring revenue, Axios reported. Yet despite its staggering funding, its funds are not unlimited, especially compared to a tech giant like Meta. Over the past year, some users have accused AI labs of passing on costs to customers amid an AI financial crisis. OpenAI, in particular, is spending a lot of money right now – it plans to spend $280 billion by 2030, according to the FT – and the calculation is expensive, while it also faces pressure from investors to improve its results before going public.
“Dots starts out as a high-end product – it uses a lot of compute,” Altman said Tuesday in a private press Q&A after his DevDay keynote, adding: “I think it will help us understand and help people understand the scope and what AI can do. But you should of course expect that we will one day do a mass market thing for billions of people.”
At DevDay, OpenAI took pains to explain why Dots (with singular agents called “Dot”) are worth money, positioning it not only as a competent personal assistant, but also as an experienced “chief of staff” or engineer. OpenAI employee Holly Li told the audience that using a Dot was “like talking to a second brain.” Altman said Dots was designed to delegate “ambitious tasks,” such as quality assurance of an unreleased product, website design, planning off-site team trips, portfolio rebalancing and creating email campaigns. “Specialist” Dots, trained in areas such as accounting and legal analysis, are expected to launch soon, and the company is working with Microsoft to integrate them into its Agent 365 platform.
The goal, Altman said, is to go beyond agents just booking, purchasing meals, searching calendars and scheduling appointments — classic use cases for consumer-facing tools like Muse.
When asked during the press Q&A how Dots was different from Muse and Instinct, another popular new AI agent, Thibault Sottiaux, head of core products at OpenAI, said it was “able to stay on track for very long periods of time.” He added that Dots’ multimodality, which will allow you to chat with an agent via text or voice and a phone call, will feel like “an incredible extension of you.” (However, Dots voice demos didn’t work at DevDay, and although OpenAI executives repeatedly highlighted the text-to-your-agent feature at the conference, the feature — already supported by Muse and Instinct — is still expected to arrive soon.)
Altman said during the question-and-answer session that long-term tasks and knowledge work are what sets Dots apart, adding, “I think it goes way beyond anything that’s available on the market today.” He said helping officers sort through to-do lists and support employees at work would be “difficult for economists to measure immediately,” but it could hopefully make a “huge difference” in how people view their jobs.
Framing Dots as a business tool not only differentiates Dots from Muse, but could also help OpenAI gain ground over Anthropic in the enterprise market. Anthropic has focused on – and dominated – enterprise AI for years, but OpenAI has devoted more resources to this area over the past year. Sarah Friar, CFO of OpenAI, said CNBC that the company’s activity had doubled since July.
OpenAI officials have also tried to promote Dots as safer and more secure, especially compared to Muse. Alexander Embiricos, the company’s Codex product manager, said OpenAI is focused on “the most reliable, safe and secure assistant,” noting that it is powered by GPT-6 Astra, the company’s “most aligned model.” During the DevDay keynote, executives also presented “OpenAI Private Intelligence,” a data privacy framework that allows companies to have “tighter controls” over their data, as well as zero data retention policy options, without any data being stored on OpenAI servers.
Altman said on stage that OpenAI hopes to “set a new standard for privacy in frontier AI.” These comments come after Muse was recently lambasted for taking over a user’s Facebook Marketplace account and giving their address to a stranger without the user realizing it.
“I think we’re in a different position than Meta in that they don’t have an AI product that has 1.2 billion users,” said Glen Coates, head of OpenAI’s applications platform. The edge in an interview. “Launching something that makes these kinds of mistakes is something we’re trying to be careful to avoid. I think we’re trying to be really deliberate about how we let our agents use the plugins, how we let agents use your identity and sign in/sign up for things, how we let your agents pay for things.”
The question is whether all this is enough to beat free. ChatGPT rose to prominence not only by being first, but also by being free – and easy to use even without a connection. Muse might be able to dominate in the AI agent space for the same reason. The other hurdle in making these AI agents as seamless as possible is that Meta offers easy integration with other platforms it owns, such as Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. (Google’s Gemini Spark agent platform has an advantage for the same reason.) Although OpenAI said users would be able to connect Dots to a wide range of external tools, they might not be as seamless as an internal integration.
For now, OpenAI is hoping that a better product will win out over a cheaper one. “We might move a little slower, but we also know that if people have Dots going out there and buying YOLO products on Facebook Marketplace, that’s just not something we want to put 1.2 billion users through,” Coates said. “We try to do things right, basically.”
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