Dots are OpenAI's cute lil guys

0:00Support for the show comes from Sonos. Most of us here at The Verge are big movie buffs. When watching at home, I don't want that experience to be any less immersive than it would be in a theater, and sound plays a huge role in that. The Verge has actually published a few pieces over the years about how much sound matters to a movie. From headphones to sound bars, a Sonos system pulls you in. So far, you might actually think the phone call is coming from inside the house. Visit sonos.com and build your system. Sonos, love the sound, feel the system. Support for the show comes from Amazon Prime. Maybe you have a project or hobby you've been meeting to tackle one day, like a much needed upgrade to your holiday decor or that cookie decorating kit you've been eyeing for years. Well, mark your calendars because Prime Big Deal Days is coming on tober 6th and 7th, and you can turn that someday project into today's reality. With two days of deals, there's never been a better time to cross that long awaited

1:03project off your list, and Prime Big Deal Days is your perfect excuse to make it happen. Whether it's getting that stand mixer for making those holiday meals or building that weight room you've been waiting for, Prime Big Deal Days is your chance to finally make your move. Mark your calendars, shop new deals every day, this Prime Big Deal Days, October 6th and 7th. Company spend can be complicated. Managing it shouldn't be. MX Corporate connects cards, expenses and payments only in one place. That's less time managing work and more time doing work that matters. Built to simplify, designed to scale. This is MX Corporate. Get started at go.amx-mx-corporate. Terms apply. Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of cute little AI agents that are definitely not dots they're like different shapes.

2:04I'm David Amell. Yesterday, open AI 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 Open AI'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. 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 HomePad, 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.

3:08So 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. 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. So, a tool that can give you suggestions that are database rather than vibes based actually feels useful to me. And finally, the most important news of the day. The Verges 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. And the best part is that each potato delivery only costs 82 cents.

4:10Total. 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. Support for the show comes from Amazon Prime. Some of us are blessed with a natural ability to do gift giving right. We probably have a few in your life. People who can make a mental ledger of what their loved ones like and buy things here and there throughout the year. My mom has always been the best gift giver in my life. She could even make the smallest gift feel incredibly special because you knew that she had really thought about that person receiving it. It doesn't have to be the biggest or the most expensive gift. It just has to show someone you were thinking about them. Well, for the rest of us, here's a tip. Getting big deal days is coming October 6th and 7th. That means that for two straight days, you can get deals on those kitchen gadgets for your dad, electronics for your brother, fitness equipment for your bestie, toys for the

5:10cousins, and so much more. There's new deals dropping every day so you can become one of those expert gift givers that we all know. And it's all happening with plenty of lead time into the holidays. So no more scrambling to come up with something less minute. The hardest part will be finding a good hiding place for it all. Mark your calendars, shop new deals every day at this prime big deal days, October 6th and 7th. Support for the show comes from Sonos. Think about the first time you heard your favorite song. Core you with. What did it make you feel? Was it the music or the lyrics that grabbed you first? And what were the specific tech specs of the sound system it was playing on? Yeah, nobody remembers that last part. Sonos gets that. Their system is designed to just be there, clear, ready, out of the way. So nothing stands between you and the next song that hits you out of left field. For a bunch of years now, I've been incredibly jealous of my friends who have Sonos speakers.

6:13I was just always impressed how all that sound and punch and energy came from that speaker in the corner. Sonos recently set me two of its play speakers and now I truly, truly get it. Everyone knows that the quality is immediately noticeable when you listen to a Sonos speaker. But the bigger thing that I've learned is how everything is working together and creating this little ecosystem. It's just really important to me, especially as the audio has become more integrated into our daily media lives, whether that's the music, a movie, and yes, the verch cast or version history or decoder. I want it to sound as good as possible. Is it sonos.com and build your system? Sonos, love the sound, feel the system. Hey, Dan, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me all the way from SF. Oh, yeah. So you just got out of the developer conference. This just happened. Right. Number one thing that the company announced was this AI dots feature. Can you explain exactly what open AI, chat, GPT dots, what is the official name for

7:16this exactly? So open AI dots is basically the company's answer to Meta's muse and open claw. It's the long anticipated, continuously running AI agent from open AI, the consumer facing one. This is something that we wrote a couple of days ago that open AI 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 open AI was working on something rumor to be almost the same. Now they've announced it. And also they made it really cute, similar to Meta's muse. They're basically cute, see little blobs with eyes and you can customize them however you want. So I think that's part of how open AI is banking on people, feeling maybe better about using these agents, same with all the other companies. It's like make them cute, make them customizable and they're hoping people will be okay with

8:20giving them a lot of data. So open AI, yeah, I mean, one of the ones that they demoed was named Alfred and you can name it whatever you want. And then immediately transformed into a Butler looking blob with glasses and a mustache. I think they had a lot of different little blobs on display. But yeah, I think there's a lot of customizable options. You can change the color. You can change the eye where, maybe. So they're in the name. So I think they're really 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 aimed at gaining users away from Meta's muse, it's only rolling out. Not to paid users pro and business users. So it's not free for everyone like me. And so I think that's kind of an interesting hallmark here. The fact that you know, open AI desperately wants to compete with Meta on this, but they

9:23can't afford to fully because it's such a compute intensive product. Yeah. Besides having an embodiment of this agent, the primary question that I have is how exactly is this different from just a regular chat GPT chat that can do things for you. You know, if you're using cloud, co-work can go control your computer. What is it about these agents that are uniquely different from just using the regular service? Essentially, there are a couple different ways. They can 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 keep their computer open and 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're supposed to be able to text with them, maybe phone call with them, talk to them in a way that is really accessible for people beyond just like a chat GPT chat window.

10:24However, open AI was even behind in that because they said the texting and calling function will be coming soon, not right now. So a lot of this is, I think, front loading something so that they have a horse in the race, but there are a couple features that they haven't yet rolled out. So open AI noted that they have over 4,000 integrations for these dots. For people that don't know, what is an integration? Yeah, basically an integration is the way that these agents are useful at all. You can use an agent in a vacuum, but that's not that helpful. The way that they become useful is using them for your life and for with other tools that you use. Think about if you had a personal assistant and then they didn't have any of your logins. I was a personal assistant back in the day and I needed my boss's Sky Miles number. I needed her calendar access. I needed her email login, basically everything for her whole life. So same thing with these agents, integrating with different platforms you use,

11:26different tools, different accounts. And yeah, with open AI, it's interesting because they don't naturally have a bunch of this stuff in house. So their integrations may work a little worse with certain products than say Google's AI agent is going to have better integrations with Google products. Met as AI agent is going to have better integrations with Meta products. So open AI is really gunning for the oh, the quantity of integrations maybe over some of the quality because they don't have anything in house, but they're like, well, we can connect to everything. It's just, it's going to be, they're basically saying it's going to be good, but it might not be as good as some of these other companies in house AI agents. I also heard something about the specialist dots that they're announcing. Can you explain what those are? They're launching these specialist AI agents that are aimed at being really good at certain niche enterprise functions. So one for legal, one for

12:27marketing, one for accounting, things like that. And they launch with a bunch of partners to start like Harvey, LaGoura, a bunch of different companies 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 agents that are just really goodness for certain field. They can kind of be a coworker in that sense where they're senior and they've been in the field for a long time is kind of a way they're positioning it. Right, because Muse is sort of around for listing things for you on Facebook marketplace, which 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 Chatchy PT. 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 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? I think that we are

13:27going to see people interested in trying it out, but I don't think it's going to be a general purpose as metas Muse, because with Muse, it's such an easy access situation. You know, it's a one tap and you're good. With dots, not only do you need to be a pro user of Chatchy PT, but also, 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, 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, there's a lot of different, 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

14:33those missteps, but also back when OpenClaw was especially viral, 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 a lot of this data. They did make a big point to talk about privacy and data privacy in particular on stage today. So, you know, they did anticipate, I think, some of that pushback. But yeah, we'll see. I mean, right now they did announce today that 1.2 billion people use Chatubt. So, it'll be interesting to see how much of a chunk of those people are going to try dots. Support for the show comes from Idea by Palo Alto Networks. Here's the statistic for you. Nine out of ten organizations suffered an identity breach last year. That happens because adversaries are logging in with valid credentials, not breaking in, and non-human identities outnumber human identities 109 to 1. That creates a massive,

15:37unmanaged attack surface and cloud environments. The problem is that legacy tools were built to manage human employees, leaving modern machine and AI access largely unmanaged. That's where Idea by Palo Alto Networks comes in. It's one identity platform for human, machine, and AI. Idea by replaces permanent permissions with dynamic access so you can lock down every identity without slowing down your business. Secure every identity at your organization with Idea by Palo Alto Networks. Learn more at paloaltonetworks.com slash idira. Again, that's paloaltonetworks.com slash idira. Support for the show comes from Amazon Prime. Some of us are blessed with a natural ability to do gift giving right. You probably have a few in your life, people who can make a mental ledger of what their loved ones like, and buy things here and there throughout the year. My mom has always been

16:40the best gift giver in my life. She could even make the smallest gift feel incredibly special because you knew that she had really thought about that person receiving it. It doesn't have to be the biggest or the most expensive gift. It just has to show someone you were thinking about them. Well, for the rest of us, here's a tip. Prime Big Deal Days is coming October 6th and 7th. That means that for two straight days, you can get deals on those kitchen gadgets for your dad, electronics for your brother, fitness equipment for your bestie, toys for the cousins, and so much more. There's new deals dropping every day so you can become one of those expert gift givers that we all know. 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. Mark your calendars. Shop new deals every day at this prime Big Deal Days. October 6th and 7th. As you were alluding to, the Metamuse agent has been under a little bit of fire recently for

17:44some mishaps that it's done agentically, of course. 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 give him and sell the item. When he just 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? They talked about the fact that this is going to be really secure, really private, really trustworthy. But I was chatting with Glenn Coates, the head of app platform at OpenAI, and I went on one interview today. And he said that he thinks they're in a different position to meta. Since they have 1.2 billion users, they want to launch something that

18:47doesn't make those types of mistakes. 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. 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. How they'll say, hey, I'm an agent on behalf of XYZ. So he said we might move a tiny bit slower, but basically they don't want to have agents that are yellow-bying stuff on Facebook marketplace. Right. 1.2 billion users. Essentially, all that translates to we're moving a little slower than meta, but we hope it's safer. And the jury is out still on it. If that is the case, we'll have to test it. Right. How important do you think it is for Anthropic or Google to develop something of a similar caliber? We've seen Grockbot. Notably looks really similar to these little muse agents. We've seen Jack Dorsey's project, which has little guys that kind of look similar to

19:52this. 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? Yeah, I mean, I think it's incredibly important. This is something that I have been seeing AI companies talk about for years. I think 2023 was when AI agents had their chat GBT moment in terms of them getting really fuzzy and executives talking about them nonstop on earnings calls, really promising investors that this is the next big thing that's finally going to 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, we'll see. I'm sure it'll be a similar offering. 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 spending up a thousand of these agents and running them? Because notably, it does not count against your

20:55chat GBT usage limits, which seems like a big deal. So do you think that that's the reason they're limiting it for now? Yeah, they said that it was a really compute-heavy product during the press Q&A. Sam Alman said, someday we'll be able to offer these for free to everyone or we hope so, but right now, it takes a lot of computing. 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. The power users that are going to be really obsessed with this, like X 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. They're trying to make this general-purpose product that everyone wants to try. I don't think it's going to be much of a limitation there. Right. Do you think that they'll probably introduce a free version for free users eventually? They said they hope so, but it seemed that he used the word someday. So, I don't think that's happening anytime soon. At least ahead of their IPO, I would imagine.

21:58Right. Well, this is the major news from the DevDay event, but would there any other big events or happenings at the event? I think the other big thing I was really thinking about is the protest happening outside. Like more than a dozen organizations came together to kind of unite and plan this protest outside DevDay that was going on from early in the morning until about the time that Sam Altman arrived and started his keynote. And so, there are 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 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, 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

23:01the fact that the voice function for dots was not working the entire time. Like they tried to demo that a couple times. It did not work. So, 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, probably after getting a lot of questions about where is your answer to Muse, I mean, they said they've been working on this for a long time. So, I'm sure they always planned to show it off at DevDay, but it showed the kinks are not all worked out. That's a very good one. Well, I didn't feel it. Thank you for coming on. Appreciate it. Thanks. That's it for the Vergecast. Let us know what you think. Call the hotline 866-111 or email Vergecast at theverge.com. And just for 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 Judge Cajas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larjak. See you next time. Rock and roll.

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