Dots are OpenAI's cute lil guys

Jolly's got new competition: OpenAI just launched its competitor to Muse and Grok Bot. It's called Dots, and the headline feature is that it's also cute, with fuzzy lil triangles and clouds and hearts that you can give access to your personal accounts to do things for you. The Verge's senior AI reporter Hayden Field joins guest host David Imel from San Francisco right after OpenAI's DevDay presentation. Further reading: OpenAI DevDay 2026: The biggest news and announcements The Vergecast has been nominated for a Signal Award! You can vote to help us win here. Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed. We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:41David Pierce?

  Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of cute little AI agents that are definitely not dots. They're like different shapes. I'm David Amell. Yesterday, OpenAI hosted its annual Dev Day. It's its big annual conference where it shows what's on the frontier of what it's developing. This year, there's a lot of companies that are all rushing to make vaguely the same thing. And the biggest news this year was OpenAI's new Dots. Dots are little agents that will go do things for you, but with one big quirk. They're really cute. I brought on senior AI reporter Hayden Field to talk about it. But first, here's what's happening on The Verge today.

• 2:20Speaker 03

  I'm Travis Larchuk, and this is 90 Seconds on The Verge for Wednesday, September 30th, 2026. We didn't see any smart home stuff at Apple's September event, but according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, we're about to on October 13th. He says that's when Apple will debut its long rumored smart home hub, which will maybe be called the Home Pad or something else. Who knows? We should also expect a new HomePod Mini and an upgraded Apple TV, according to Gurman. Apple Home users have been waiting on these updates for literally years. So what's another fortnight to wait? Next up, Instagram announced a new AI creative assistant that will give you feedback on your posts and suggestions on how to increase engagement.

• 3:04Speaker 03

  YouTube announced a similar feature recently, and I know that this feels icky to some people, but personally, I'm interested. If you make content for social media, you know that sometimes it's really hard to figure out why one thing hit and another thing didn't. It feels arbitrary a lot of the time. And so a tool that can give you suggestions that are data based rather than vibes based actually feels useful to me. And finally, the most important news of the day. The Verge's Nathan Edwards reports that dads in his Texas neighborhood are sending each other single potatoes by drone. They're ordering them from Walmart using wing drone delivery. The dads reportedly discovered that they can have the potatoes delivered to anyone's yard, not just their own yards.

• 3:49Speaker 03

  And the best part is that each potato delivery only costs 82 cents total. At that price, you can't afford not to send your neighbor a potato. You can read more at theverge.com. That's 90 Seconds on The Verge for Wednesday, September 30th, 2026.

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• 6:40David Pierce?

  Hayden, thanks for joining us.

• 6:42Speaker 04

  Thanks for having me all the way from SF.

• 6:45David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah. So you just got out of the developer conference. This just happened.

• 6:49Speaker 04

  Right.

• 6:49David Pierce?

  Number one thing that the company announced was this AI Dots feature. Can you explain exactly what OpenAI ChatGPT Dots? What is the official name for this exactly?

• 7:00Speaker 04

  So OpenAI's Dots is basically the company's answer to Meta's Muse and OpenClaw. It's the long anticipated, continuously running AI agent from OpenAI, the consumer facing one. You know, this is something that we wrote a couple of days ago that OpenAI really needed to catch up on. It was one of the areas that everyone was looking at the company saying, okay, well, where is theirs? It's strange that they're behind on this. That was kind of the consensus that Meta had suddenly pulled ahead and it was unexpected. And that, you know, OpenAI was working on something rumored to be almost the same. Now they've announced it. And also, they made it really cute, similar to Meta's Muse.

• 7:44Speaker 04

  They're basically cutesy little blobs with eyes and you can customize them however you want. So I think that's part of how OpenAI is banking on people, you know, feeling maybe better about using these agents. Same with all the other companies. It's like make them cute, make them customizable. And, you know, they're hoping people will be okay with giving them a lot of data. So OpenAI, yeah, I mean, like, you know, one of the ones that they demoed was named Alfred. And it's, you know, you can name it whatever you want. And then, you know, it immediately transformed into like a butler looking blob with like, you know, glasses and a mustache. I think they had a lot of different, different little blobs on display. But yeah, I think, you know, there's a lot of customizable options.

• 8:29Speaker 04

  You can change the color, you can change like the eyewear hat maybe. So there and the name. So I think they're really, you know, hoping that people kind of go ham on the personalization here. The most interesting part of it, though, to me is that although this is directly, you know, aimed at, you know, kind of gaining users away from Meta's Muse, it's only rolling out to paid users, pro and business users. So it's not free for everyone like Muse is. And so I think that's kind of a interesting hallmark here. The fact that, you know, OpenAI desperately wants to compete with Meta on this, but they can't afford to fully because it's such a compute intensive product.

• 9:11David Pierce?

  Yeah. Besides having an embodiment of this agent, the primary question that I have is how exactly is this different from just a regular ChatGPT chat that can do things for you? You know, if you're using Claude, cowork can go control your computer. What is it about these agents that are uniquely different from just using the regular service?

• 9:30Speaker 04

  Essentially, there are a couple of different ways. They can

• 9:36Speaker 04

  Go off and do things for you in the background continuously, even without you having the window open. You know, so that's a big selling point for people. You know, they don't have to, you know, keep their computer open and stay, stay awake or whatever. They can just go off and live their life and the agent is doing stuff in the background. Another part of it is that, of course, you know, you're supposed to be able to text with them, maybe phone call with them, talk to them in a way that, um, you know, is really accessible for people beyond just like a chat GPT chat window. However, OpenAI was even behind in that because they said the texting and calling function will be coming soon. Not right now, you know, but so that's a lot of this is, I think,

• 10:18Speaker 04

  front loading something so that they have a horse in the race. But, you know, there are a couple of features that they haven't yet rolled out.

• 10:26David Pierce?

  So OpenAI noted that they have over 4,000 integrations for these dots. For people that don't know, what is an integration?

• 10:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, basically, an integration is like the way that these agents are useful at all. Cause you know, you could use an agent in a vacuum, but okay, that's not that helpful. The way that they become useful is using them for your life and for with the other tools that you use. Like, think about if you had a personal assistant and then they didn't have any of your logins. You know, I was a personal assistant back in the day and I needed my boss's SkyMiles number. Uh, I needed her calendar access. I needed, um, her like email login, basically everything for her whole life. So same thing with these agents, you know, integrating with different platforms you use, different tools, um, different accounts. And yeah, with OpenAI, it's interesting because they don't naturally have a bunch of this stuff in-house.

• 11:17Speaker 04

  So their integrations may work a little worse with certain products than, you know, say, Google's AI agent is going to have better integrations with Google products. Meta's AI agent is going to have better integrations with Meta products. So, you know, OpenAI is really gunning for the, oh, the, the quantity, you know, of integrations maybe over some of the quality. Cause they don't have anything in-house, but they're like, well, you know, we can connect to everything. It's just, it's going to be, they, they basically are saying it's going to be good, but it might not be as good as some of these other companies in-house AI agents.

• 11:52David Pierce?

  Right. I also heard something about the specialist dots that they're announcing. Can you, uh, explain what those are?

• 11:59Speaker 04

  They're launching these specialist AI agents that are aimed at being really good at certain niche enterprise functions. So, you know, one for legal, one for marketing, one for accounting, things like that. And they launched with a bunch of partners to start, like, um, Harvey, Legora, a bunch of different companies, um, you know, that are in these different fields. So it'll be interesting to see how those play out. I don't know if they're live yet, but they will be soon. And so, yeah, they're supposed to be, you know, agents that are just, you know, really good in a certain field. And, you know, they can kind of, uh, be a coworker in that sense where, you know, they're senior and they, they've been in the field for a long time is kind of the way they're positioning it.

• 12:41David Pierce?

  Right. Because Muse is sort of around for listing things for you on Facebook Marketplace, which, you know, we've had some problems with so far already. It's supposed to do things for you in your personal life. A lot of people use chat GPT and a lot of people probably have Pro. People that have Pro are, you know, it's $20 a month and they can access these, uh, dots. Do you think that they're going to see a lot of interesting use cases from this? Or do you think that it's primarily targeted at work?

• 13:09Speaker 04

  I think that we are going to see people interested in trying it out, but I don't think it's going to be as general purpose as Meta's Muse, because with Muse, it's such an easy, um, access situation. You know, it's a one tap and you're, you're good. With dots, not only do you need to be a pro user of chat GPT, but also, um, you know, there's a little bit more friction in terms of integration. So I think, you know, with Meta, a lot of this stuff just automatically seamlessly integrates into all Meta products. And same with Google, um, you know, they have a bunch of existing in-house stuff. So I think that with OpenAI, there's a little bit more friction there. They did try to talk a lot about how they're overcoming that friction and how, you know,

• 13:52Speaker 04

  there's a lot of different, um, you know, sign-ins and, you know, apps that you can use with these things. But I still think there is more friction to adopting this. And people are already a little bit uncomfortable with AI agents to begin with, especially, you know, with the AI populism rise and also the news of how AI agents can be pretty non-secure with handling your data and your stuff. Not only Muse with Facebook Marketplace and those, um, missteps, but also, um, back when OpenClaw was especially viral, uh, you know, all the security issues that happened there, deleting emails, things like that. So, you know, it'll be interesting to see how people, how many people choose to trust OpenAI with, um, a lot of this data.

• 14:34Speaker 04

  They did make a, a big point to talk about privacy, um, and data privacy in particular onstage today. So, you know, they, they did anticipate, I think, some of that pushback. But yeah, we'll see. I mean, right now, they, they did announce today that 1.2 billion people use chat GPT. So it'll be interesting to see how much of a chunk of those people are going to try dots.

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• 16:06Speaker 00

  Support for the show comes from Amazon Prime. I know what you're thinking. It feels like you've blinked and suddenly it's October. Before you start asking yourself where the year went, ask yourself if you're ready for the holidays. If the answer isn't a confident yes, don't sweat it. Prime Big Deal Days is here, and that means two days of epic deals with new deals every day. October 6th and 7th only, Prime members can save on home decor, fitness gear, electronics, toys, and so much more. You can get something for everyone on your list and maybe something special for yourself too. And it's all happening with plenty of lead time into the holidays. So no more scrambling to come up with something last minute. The hardest part will be finding a good hiding place for it all.

• 16:51Speaker 00

  Sometimes the best gifts are the ones you just give, well, because. I'm constantly inspired by the people around me. And when I see something that reminds me of someone, I love being able just to get it for them. Whether I'm planning a gift weeks in advance or I just suddenly think of something at the last minute. Prime makes it easier to find something that feels right and get it when I need it. Prime Big Deal Days is here. Shop deals now.

• 17:20David Pierce?

  As you were alluding to, the Meta Muse agent has been under a little bit of fire recently for some mishaps that it's, uh, done agentically, of course. You know, we've seen these agents do things to governments. Now we're seeing them do things to regular people. One of them was that someone was selling something on Facebook Marketplace and without even telling the user, it told someone his address. It told him that he was there and ready to come down and, and give him and sell the item, when he just like, wasn't there. All of this was automated. There were some problems with this. Did OpenAI address any of these issues or maybe some potential issues that these agentic objects are going to start doing?

• 18:02Speaker 04

  They talked about the fact that, you know, this is going to be really secure, really private, really trustworthy. But I was chatting with Glenn Coats, um, the head of app platform at OpenAI in a one-on-one interview today. And he said that he thinks they're in a different position to Meta in that, um, they, since they have. 1.2 billion users. They want to launch something that doesn't make those types of mistakes. And you know, they're trying to really be deliberate with how they let agents use plugins and how they allow agents to use people's identity and sign in and sign up for things, how they let agents pay for things.

• 18:42Speaker 04

  And they're also working with third-party standards bodies about how agents will attest that they're an agent when they're doing things, like how they'll say, hey, I'm an agent on behalf of, you know, XYZ. So he said, we might move a tiny bit slower, but basically, you know, they don't want to have agents that are YOLO buying stuff on Facebook Marketplace for, you know, 1.2 billion users. So, you know, essentially, all of that translates to, we're moving a little slower than Meta, but we hope it's safer. And, you know, the jury's out still, and if that is the case, we'll have to test it.

• 19:17David Pierce?

  Right. How important do you think it is for Anthropic or Google to develop something of a similar caliber, right? We've seen Grokbot, notably looks really similar to these little Muse agents. You know, we've seen Jack Dorsey's project, which has little guys that kind of look similar to this. There's a big push in Silicon Valley right now to make agents look really cutesy and have these little agents you can interact with every day. Do you think it's important for Anthropic or Google to make something similar like this?

• 19:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I think it's incredibly important. This is something that I have been seeing AI companies talk about for years. You know, I think 2023 was when AI agents had their chat GPT moment in terms of them getting really buzzy and, you know, executives talking about them nonstop on earnings calls, really promising investors that this is the next big thing, the thing that's finally going to, you know, break through and make a ton of money. So OpenAI's answer to that is, okay, we're only going to give it to paid users and we're going to go really hard on enterprise. Anthropic, you know, we'll see, I'm sure it'll be a similar, similar offering.

• 20:21David Pierce?

  Right now, you can only have one OpenAI dot per account, but they said that more are coming in the future. Do you think that that's a limitation in any way? Or do you think that OpenAI is just worried about people spinning up 1,000 of these agents and kind of running them? Because notably, it does not count against your chat GPT usage limits, which seems like a big deal. So do you think that that's the reason they're limiting it for now?

• 20:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, they said that it was a really compute-heavy product during the press Q and A. Sam Altman said, you know, someday we'll be able to offer these for free to everyone, you know, or we hope so, but right now, you know, it takes a lot of compute. And so I think that's the same reason why they're only offering one right now. They want to see how it goes and then maybe offer more later. But yeah, I do think it's a limitation in some ways. You know, the power users that are going to be really obsessed with this, like, you know, ex-OpenClaw users potentially are used to having a bunch of agents working on their behalf. So with a subset of people, I think it will be a limitation for others. You know, if they're trying to make this a general-purpose product that everyone wants to try, I don't think it's going to be much of a limitation there.

• 21:24David Pierce?

  Right. Do you think that they'll probably introduce a free version for free users eventually?

• 21:29Speaker 04

  They said they hope so, but you know, it seemed, he used the word someday. So, you know, I don't think that's happening anytime soon, at least ahead of their IPO, I would imagine.

• 21:39David Pierce?

  Right. Well, this is the major news from the Dev Day event, but were there any other big events or happenings at the event?

• 21:46Speaker 04

  I think the other big thing I was really thinking about is the protests happening outside. A lot, like more than a dozen organizations came together to kind of, you know, unite and plan this protest outside Dev Day that was going on from early in the morning until about the time that Sam Altman arrived and started his keynote. And so, you know, there were art pieces outside, there were a ton of protesters marching in a circle, there were a lot of chants, a lot of different signs. Most of them were protesting, you know, AI lab contracts with military and the government, particularly ICE. So, yeah, it was really interesting to see how many different organizations came together. It was even sponsored in part by the San Francisco Labor Council. So, yeah, I mean, it definitely made waves.

• 22:29Speaker 04

  Everyone saw these people when they were going inside. And so I think that is something that, you know, was definitely a topic of discussion today. Another thing that I thought was interesting was the fact that the voice function for Dots was not working the entire time at Dev Day. Like, they tried to demo that a couple of times, it did not work. So, you know, at least we know it was a live demo, but it also showed, you know, they may have rushed this, we don't know. So, you know, probably after getting a lot of questions about where's your answer to Muse, I mean, I'm sure, they said they've been working on this for a long time, so I'm sure they always, you know, planned to, yeah, yeah, they planned to, you know, show

• 23:12Speaker 04

  it off at Dev Day, but, you know, it shows the kinks aren't all worked out necessarily.

• 23:17David Pierce?

  Yeah. Well, Hayden Field, thank you for coming on. Appreciate it.

• 23:20Speaker 04

  Thanks.

• 23:21David Pierce?

  That's it for The Vergecast. Let us know what you think. Call the hotline 866-VERGE11 or email [email protected]. And to support everything we do here and to get ad-free podcasts, subscribe to The Verge. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The Vergecast is produced by Josh Kahas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. See you next time. Rock and roll.