OpenAI's dots assistant costs $100 a month and never stops working

OpenAI's new AI assistant, dots, costs $100 a month at minimum and keeps working while you sleep. The company released the product at its developer day in late September, and it's available now in the ChatGPT desktop and mobile apps to subscribers on the Pro tier or higher.

Alexander Embiricos, who leads OpenAI's enterprise product team, explained the product's origins at TechCrunch Disrupt this month. The always-on assistant — one that works in the background even when you aren't prompting it — has become this year's answer to how people will actually use large language models. The startup Instinct became an overnight sensation, and Meta put its marketing weight behind its own assistant, Muse.

Why the cutesy mascot? "There's kind of this convergent evolution happening," Embiricos said of rival efforts to build AI assistants. "As we were working on the product, we realized if we could frame this as, it's an entity and it's a single conversation, not many different conversations….it starts to become intuitive."

How did a coding tool become a personal assistant?

The name is a play on the negative space inside OpenAI's logo, and it's meant "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 product's lineage runs through OpenAI's coding business. OpenAI spun ChatGPT Work out of the agentic coding tools it had built for software engineers, including the Codex app released at the beginning of this year. Embiricos points out you could achieve much of dots' functionality with Codex — but that requires more work and hand-holding. He recalled celebrating when his wife started leaving her computer on all night so her agents could keep working.

"On the product team, what I think about is, how do we make this intuitive and useful to people?" he told Disrupt attendees. "A lot of that isn't building some new piece of tech into the product; it's how you frame it to the user and how it feels."

For OpenAI, a persistent agent means more token usage. For users, it means an assistant "that's sort of thinking about you and thinking how to help you," as Embiricos put it.

Does the assistant actually think ahead?

Sometimes. In testing, dots flags calendar conflicts and upcoming deadlines, but not always in time. "The first time it told me about one of those [conflicts]—this is like early in development—it told me three minutes before the thing," Embiricos said of his dot. "It's like, 'Hey, this thing is coming up. You might want to do something about it.' I only have three minutes!"

He expects the timing to improve. He also relayed a story from an engineer at a drone delivery startup: "We had this outage, and by the time I noticed that the outage was going on, my dot had already noticed the outage was happening, had already analyzed the outage, and had come to me with useful information for how we could resolve the outage."

How much personal data does dots collect?

The question matters because Muse has drawn criticism for building profiles of users' family and friends — data that could add value to Meta's advertising business. OpenAI does collect something: "Yes, we have a thing that we built into dots, which we call proactive research," Embiricos said. "On a cadence, it will think about what it knows about you, what is the conversation that it's had, and then what have you given it access to that it can think about, and then it will go and research, 'What could I do to be more helpful to you?' And then, basically, it will propose that."

Startup Hark, which is building its own AI assistant, explicitly notes it doesn't collect data to fuel an advertising business the way OpenAI and Meta do.

OpenAI says dots carries the same privacy controls as ChatGPT itself: users can turn off model training and control which resources the agent accesses. Still, the controls aren't granular, and the app can be pushy — it refuses read-only access to cloud drives.

"What I think we need to do is basically build out super, super, super granular controls," Embiricos said. He also acknowledged early criticism: "We had really conservative defaults over what the agent would do, and it would ask for permission a lot. I remember knowing that we were going to see that feedback, but thinking, 'This is okay, we can tune that over time.'"

Can personal AI agents scale?

Embiricos himself keeps a human assistant, because OpenAI's corporate partners want to interact with a person. "I personally never intend to have a meeting with someone else's agent," he said.

On infrastructure, he was guarded: "At OpenAI…we're not always moving the fastest in terms of shipping the next ability for the agent to work with the world. When we do, we're doing it really closely in collaboration with the rest of the ecosystem. I probably can't say too much here, but we're deep in lots of conversations with payment processors."

An assistant that spends money through payment partnerships would be a lucrative first for OpenAI — and a much bigger ask of consumers than access to an inbox.