The always-on AI personal assistant, which keeps working in the background even when you aren’t asking it to, is this year’s 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 wasn’t going to be left out.
The company released dots, its assistant offering, at its developer day in late September. Alexander Embiricos, who leads OpenAI’s enterprise product team, joined us at TechCrunch Disrupt this month to explain where the product came from—starting with the question of why so many companies seem to be turning to cutesy mascots as avatars for their trillion-parameter matrix multiplication machines. 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 dots’ functionality with Open AI’s 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.
Even the name—a play on the negative space inside of OpenAI’s logo—is intended “to feel like just something that could eventually be ubiquitous.” (Asked when he learned that rival AI entrepreneur Elon Musk owns the dot.com URL, Embiricos said, “I found out very late.”) The idea of a persistent agent is that it doesn’t need prompting. For OpenAI, means more token usage, and for users, a more pro-active assistant “that’s sort of thinking about you and thinking how to help you,” as Embiricos put it. In our testing, the assistant’s ability to think ahead is apparent and often useful, but it isn’t quite there yet.
It will flag calendar conflicts and upcoming deadlines, but not necessarily in the most timely fashion. You might want to do something about it.’ I only have three minutes!” Embiricos expects the timing to improve over time, but the proactive approach is key to the product. Muse has been criticized for the profiles it builds of 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 Meta’s advertising business.
Does dots collect similar data? Hark, a start-up developing its own AI personal assistant, is explicit in pointing out it that it doesn’t 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.
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