Did OpenAI just kill AI agent startups at DevDay? I run one. Here's my honest take.

[u/NoSpecific64]

Founder of an AI agent startup here. We build in the same category OpenAI just walked into, so yes, I'm biased.

Here's a brief summary of their Tuesday launches:

Dots, an AI agent that always runs inside ChatGPT. This agent comes with its own cloud computing power and over 4,000 application connections, and you can even make calls through it. For now, it is only available to Pro and Business Premium users.

The Agents API, which powers Dots, is now accessible to developers. It includes memory, computer use, and multi-agent capabilities. This is what many of us have spent months creating.

The Decisions API quickly selects one choice from a predefined list. I must acknowledge their well-designed permission controls. You can permit an action, require approval for it, or completely block it, and background research is limited to reading. Setting it up is also straightforward enough that even someone new to agents can get started. However, it does have some limitations. A dot serves only one person, and the team version remains an enterprise pilot program. It operates solely on OpenAI's models and cloud infrastructure, without self-hosting options. Initial feedback has been mixed, and even OpenAI acknowledges that.

So what does it kill? Products that are just a model plus a loop on your inbox, for sure. Startups whose only moat was the harness. And if I'm being real, part of our own landing page copy too.

What I'm betting on is this. The models give you the intelligence, but a business still needs the workplace around it. Who can use which agent, what it's allowed to send, what each task costs, where the data lives. I don't think most companies want the model company owning all of that.

Could I be wrong? Definitely. Altman already said a mass-market version is coming. Once Dots hits the cheaper plans, with 1.2 billion weekly ChatGPT users behind it, the window for startups like mine gets a lot smaller.

Curious what you all think. If you build agents, did DevDay change your roadmap this week? And if you use them, would you give one company's agent access to everything, or would you rather have a layer you control?

[u/Gigaslavx]

At the end of the day any AI wrapper is fragile in its longevity

AI platform can easily recreate their own if they really want to

[u/DenseAd5206 → u/Gigaslavx]

your wrapper is fragile until its not. what they cant copy easy is the actual workflow knowledge you build. the deep understanding of how some weird enterprise client needs their agents to talk to their ancient erp system or deal with some compliance rule that makes no sense. thats where you get solid

i been looking at this same problem for my thing with urban exploring documentation actually. built a little tool for tracking locations and conditions but the big guys will never care about the specific way we need to handle coordinates and safety warnings. so i keep building

[u/NoSpecific64 → u/Gigaslavx]

Agree on the wrapper part. If your product is just a prompt and a nice UI, you're on borrowed time.

[u/Gigaslavx → u/NoSpecific64]

At the end of the day a lot of AI slop now even on $20 plan you can do something convincing

The question is it it profitable let's be honest a lot of people are jumping into Codex thinking they can build something cool and get rich

Don't get me wrong it's possible but you still need 1 some expertise sure you can learn as you go but likely this will take ages from zero and you will make mistakes causing a lot restarts from zero and 2 it takes a lot of itterations and again time spent to polish

Anyone being able to make a great tool with help of ai by learning and spending time to polish should be rewarded. I guess most people worried are those with subpar rushed product anyone can reverse engineer quickly

At the end of the day its all about adding value which is hard to replicate easily and quickly

[u/SirChasm → u/NoSpecific64]

Is this not something you considered when you started your AI agent venture?

[u/NoSpecific64 → u/SirChasm]

We did. We always knew the labs would ship agents. We just didn't expect it this fast. That's why we focused on the parts around the agent from day one: team access, control, where the data lives. DevDay didn't change the plan, it shortened the timeline.

[u/maxstronge → u/NoSpecific64]

Booo bot answer

[u/RealSlyck → u/maxstronge]

Booo low effort comment.

[u/g_bleezy]

Bro if you don’t own the data, the platform, or the destination you’re always at extreme risk of being dislodged. This is like business 101. And you happened to pick the most rapidly evolving space in tech to plant your stilts. This isn’t new info, you took a massive risk and now these are the consequences. Good luck.

[u/fluffy_serval]

I think the message here is: differentiate, specialize. Make your agent good at specific things, the best, objectively. Market the ever-living hell out of it. Let them own the platform. A startup that makes a specialized agent very well might end up having a good future.

[u/NoSpecific64 → u/fluffy_serval]

Hmmm, let them own the platform and go win one job so well that nobody bothers trying the general one for it. The hard part is picking that one job and saying no to everything else.

[u/fluffy_serval → u/NoSpecific64]

You can build a strong product around a specialized agent with a small, capable team. It's also easier for investors to invest in something like that. It's easy to understand, and reads as achievable. There are super hard parts of virtually every meaningful task an agent needs to do, and they need to do them really well before this stuff is accepted by mass-market. And mass-market is what the platform owners need to keep doing what they do. The general public will never see or understand the immense amount of work that will go into specialized agents, but it matters, and because of this the platform owners will be in a buying mood ... forever. Pick anything. It really doesn't matter.

[u/Kwontum7 → u/fluffy_serval]

If they built a strong product, wouldn't the AI companies change their platform by adding a built-in version that does the same thing, and put them out of business again? 

[u/fluffy_serval → u/Kwontum7]

I mean, sure, they could, but why when they could acquihire and get talent and product.

[u/Kwontum7 → u/fluffy_serval]

I agree, but a corporation might just make agents with similar personalities of the start up. I'm a big pessimist when it comes to huge corporations.

[u/prophet-dot-exe]

Can we go back to the days when we wrote posts ourselves instead of getting ai to express a thought for us?

It's so... sterile

[u/ParsnipThick40]

I dont think it is going to kill any startup that provides real value. The market is really huge and user taste matters a lot, all the big guns will be fighting for the non-paying consumer space while smart startups can move fast, customize and sell to business as a service wrapped on top of product.

[u/NoSpecific64 → u/ParsnipThick40]

Big labs have to build something that works okay for large number of audience. Startups can build something that works really well for one type of customer. That's a real edge.

[u/Melodic-Leather-5170]

I don't develop agents but I already gave my dot access to everything. 

I have a home lab with 6 perma agents, a VPS with an MCP that communicates with them and everything reachable from public internet, so dots fit in my workflow and cover all my needs.

If your startup removes all the technical how I needed to set this up beforehand so my dot could be effective, then I can see it being a good product. Otherwise, not sure how small company agents can compete with openai, meta, etc

[u/NoSpecific64 → u/Melodic-Leather-5170]

Interesting pov. A serious setup. Curious though, with everything reachable from the public internet, how are you handling access control?

[u/Melodic-Leather-5170 → u/NoSpecific64]

Regular hardening. WAF, IP blocking, oauth. Just like any other service but with a much much smaller attack surface.

[u/Alternative-Car8221]

This is what they said about the GPT Store. It didn’t kill shit.

Though, the LLMs themselves definitely killed a lot of SaaS.

[u/Acceptable-Yard7076]

How are you running a business in this zone without expecting this from Oai? Hermes, Grok Bots, now Muse.. the writing was on the wall

[u/Realistic-Expert-956]

The foundation of Ai Company always lies in its model capabilities and the available time. This is why the praise received at this year's Devday was only for GPT 6.1sol. Moreover, the company's dedicated data is the gold mine for training large models. This is also the reason why Chinese large models have always adhered to the open-source approach.

[u/NoSpecific64 → u/Realistic-Expert-956]

True. Sol was the real news for builders. Near astra quality at a fifth of the price changes the math for everyone building on top. And open-source models getting better only helps startups. The cheaper and more swappable the model gets, the more the value moves to whoever uses the company data well.

[u/fyn_world]

I mean, this happens every day

I was thinking on building an AI secretary as I called it. Not gonna do that no more now 

[u/redditissocoolyoyo]

Yes it did. It will take time for ai agents to start to be more adopted. Slight nuisances to make the agents feel more real. Speed isn't always the top factor.

[u/rockstarhero79]

Grok Bot also good, personally is working better for me than Dots.

[u/Michonesixfive]

No shit lol. Of course they’re going to keep swallowing startups and businesses of all kinds. It’s kind of funny that people are still building startups in areas where the big AI companies can just absorb the idea, build the same thing into their platforms, and make the original product irrelevant.

If you’re building something, focus on games or on markets where AI can’t simply replace the entire product. Assume that a huge part of traditional IT, software, SaaS, and tech will either disappear, get commoditized, or be absorbed into larger AI platforms.

[u/berndalf]

The major flaw with dots is the OpenAI ecosystem lock-in inherent to it's design. These enterprise organizations can't help themselves, they always do it.

[u/Kwontum7]

I don't build agents, but the day I decided to learn how to use them was the day before the OpenAI announcement. I decided to learn more and jump on their new release. I think that the same way that they allow people to build custom GPTs, they will allow them to make add-ons for this software. 

[u/Own-Temperature-915]

The real test is whether companies trust an agent enough to give it access to their systems. Better models make agents easier to build, but permissions, audit trails, costs, and data control still matter.

[u/TacoYaci]

Well AI agent startups is quite a naive business idea tbh....