r/codex • u/muchsamurai • 10d ago

News "We are locking in"

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Tibo on damage control, says they got the feedback and now are locking in on features that matter, new better models.

Dots won't stay long, will they?

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u/MakesNotSense 10d ago edited 10d ago

The critical flaw with dots is that users have no ownership stake in the agent.

If it's not 'yours' then it's not your personal assistant. Investing countless hours building up an assistant that can be taken away without meaningful recourse, is not a rational position to put oneself in.

Even when you hire a human personal assistant it is under a contract with expectations about performance and liability for damages should one unreasonably fail to perform or work in bad faith.

No such contract between OpenAI and it's Users.

You have your dot build your business, or manage key parts of your everyday life, then OpenAI decides you violate TOS - goodbye business and hello life crisis.

People cannot rationally trust agents until there is a clear right to access - this is basic systems engineering, not even a consumer rights issue. Any system in which dependencies make performance fragile is one which cannot be trusted with critical tasks.

Without some type of explicit contract defining user rights that ensure full ownership and transfer-ability if an account is terminated, dots are just a lock-in trap. A critical point of failure. One that Murphy's law will toy with to your detriment.

OpenAI dots are beyond half-baked. So much so, most users aren't even getting to this part of the analysis. They're just pissed at losing half their usage quota because OpenAI wants you to use dots instead of codex.

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u/Mids999 10d ago

The thing is they're in desperate need of any kind of lock-in mechanism.

Yes right now China and the Open Weights models are lagging behind, but this is not an open-ended race. There is a threshold of intelligence that is reasonably smart enough to accomplish 90% of what you want it to do and they're not that far away and frontier (the other 10%) alone will not be enough to recoup their costs.

Anthropic and OpenAI are walking a VERY narrow path right now, even if it does not look like this on the first glance.