OpenAI’s Dots lead on the future of ChatGPT

Okay, Alex, I want to go deep on DOTS. But first, I want to just talk about this moment we're in as an industry. It's something I've been thinking about a lot, and there's so many new products that are constantly popping up, which is this rise of personal agents. And it feels like it's a combination of a lot of things, the models, getting capable enough to really power these experiences, things like browser use, computer use really taking off, people figuring out the harness. And now you guys have DOTS, which is the open AI bet on this form factor. I would be curious to hear you like bigger picture, maybe talk about why this moment is happening now.

Totally. And yeah, I agree this is a massive moment. I joined OpenAI a little over two years ago, and I've basically been on a mission to ship DOTS since I joined. And so I'm like thrilled that it's happening. So, you know, recapping quickly, we had chat, right? Chat was like, it's very obvious today, but it was not obvious that that would be the right way for many people to get value from LLMs when we started. the wave after chat was coding agents and then eventually those agents useful for knowledge work and the big improvement from chat to coding agents was like hey now these agents can do things right but there was still this like fundamental problem which is i think the main problem we're solving with this next era you know the third chapter active intelligence we call it And that's that even if you have an incredibly powerful coding agent, it's kind of like you have this incredible principal engineer who refuses to check Slack, refuses to check Linear, and basically only does things when they're told by you. And if you're a power user, you can set up automations and kind of get them going more independently. But for a sort of normal user, that doesn't happen. And so for me, This is happening now because we're finally ready to provide intelligence in a way that's much more intuitive for people, in a way that you don't have to put all the onus on yourself to get value from the product, but it can start proposing to you what it's going to do and how it's going to help. So that's the problem. And then we can get more into the reasons, but I think broadly it is The model capabilities are there. And I think that maybe, so I agree with you on what you said. Maybe the thing you didn't mention that I think is underrated is there's actually a lot of human change that needs to happen for these products to get adopted. You know, like if you look at like a company or a team adopting coding agents, day zero, when they don't know how to use them and they're not connected to any tools, to like day 400, the agents are connected to a bunch of tools. They have access to context. um people have best practices i think that's the other major thing we needed right because if you think of a proactive agent if it doesn't have access to context it can't actually be proactive in helping you um so i could go on but

yeah the connectors and all that stuff being a place where people are bringing their data into these experiences

yeah

yeah that makes sense you said you joined uh it's been your mission to ship dots ever since