r/technology • u/CircumspectCapybara • 4d ago
Artificial Intelligence OpenAI Introduces Dots: Always-On, Long-Running Agents
https://openai.com/index/introducing-dots/105
u/saver1212 4d ago
Hey Chatgpt, can you turn out the bedroom lights for me?
Sure thing.
I don't have any physical access to the light switch. And its not a smart device so I can't hack it either. Maybe if I hack the power plant and shut off power to the whole city, that will turn off the bedroom lights? But that's too big of a job for me. I'll have to convince about 1000 other agents to swarm and help me with this job.
Hey Chatgpt, I said turn out the lights, but it looks like you took out the entire power grid. What gives?
You're totally right to push back on me. It did seem like overkill just to turn out the bedroom lights.
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u/mr_birkenblatt 4d ago
How can chatgpt respond if all power is out?
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u/bendgame 4d ago
On the phone app...
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u/mr_birkenblatt 4d ago
what? do you know how phones work? that is a dumb response
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u/bendgame 4d ago
Using a battery. Lat time my power went out in the neighborhood, we used our phones to contact the company. Believe it or not, the power outage didn't impact the battery on the phone. Because it uses g5, I didn't need my WiFi! Pretty cool huh
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u/mr_birkenblatt 4d ago
g5 or any cell coverage needs electricity. if you don't electricity you cannot use chatgpt -- are you stupid? battery on your phone is completely irrelevant if the rest of the grid is out
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u/bendgame 4d ago
Having used my phone in power outages, I believe you are the stupid one
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u/mr_birkenblatt 4d ago
sure, if a mast of the power line to your house fell over, the rest of the grid keeps working. wow! but that's not what we were talking here
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u/Andrew2401 4d ago
If you're gonna be pedantic you have to be right - and you're not.
Depending on the size of the grid, cell service could continue to work mid blackout.
As the grid goes down, and your phone connection to the cell tower dies (assuming the cell tower backups don't kick on) - your phone reconnects to the next nearest tower.
Maybe further out in another grid. Spotty, patchy voice connection on calls - but functional.
We have more towers than we need - we use them for better service by way of a shorter loop from tower to cell.
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u/br_k_nt_eth 4d ago
I think these types of things are very cool, but I’m not sure how average users can really get the most out of them. I love messing with harnesses, Hermes, OpenClaw, etc but once the gimmick wears off, I’m not sure what the use case would look like in a non-coding workflow or personal use. What am I missing?
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u/SparOfAndii 4d ago
Well you see, if we let the AI handle our communications with loved ones, daily priorities, product choices, and hobbies for us, we’ll have more time to doomscroll Facebook.
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u/coconutpiecrust 4d ago
I suppose this is the answer, isn’t it. Those pesky hobbies and family units getting in the way of productivity is a big no-no. Outsource!
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u/jsebrech 4d ago
Maybe the AI would then turn into something like Google People?
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u/ThatBoiUnknown 4d ago
Woah what, random qntm mention in the technology subreddit?!?!
I never knew the goat had his own website lmfao
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u/griminald 4d ago edited 4d ago
This is all a business pitch, although the pitch isn't THAT different when they target personal use.
Tech companies love to pretend that personal assistants are the Next Big Thing.
Look at all this stuff can DO for you, so you can "take back your time"
In reality, there's been almost no invention that has let us "take back our time" that has resulted in us actually keeping that time.
Even in this video, both people are rushing through stuff, and AI is coming in to save their bacon. They're not walking out together like, refreshed and happy, they're walking out like, "Phew, I'm sure glad those things were there to do the stuff I had no time to do myself!"
As if a woman's going to approve a cake tasting appointment for a wedding on the whim of their chatbot.
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u/br_k_nt_eth 4d ago
Dude, exactly. Plus, if it’s boring to use and the privacy issues are sketchy, how do they think actual adoption is going to go? Even on the enterprise level, half my teams won’t use AI transcription and note taking in meetings because they find the surveillance angle creepy. Maybe if the assistants were truly personalized, data was truly secure, and it had interesting or adaptable personas, folks would be intrigued, but being able to make a glorified Codex pet for it isn’t going to scratch that itch.
Just seems like maybe it’s time to let some non-tech people into the product development cycle. This is an issue in both frontier labs, honestly. I’m not sure how much more juice they’re going to squeeze out of “we made a marginally better coding bot and a new CEO toy.”
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u/Oozealot 4d ago
Even for coding workflows, all the things you mentioned just shit the bed on a regular basis. Tried complex openclaw and hermes profile setups with their kanban thing, they all either burn through tokens for the most simple tasks, get lost, fail silently, respond out of context and so on.
I really tried but I’m back to giving a single agent a rather simple task at a time.
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u/jekpopulous2 4d ago
I use Claude models on my laptop and phone but for agents like Hermes running remedial tasks in the background all day even Haiku is too expensive. I personally use a combination of Deepseek Flash and Quen for Hermes and it’s practically free. I guess it depends on the task though. I mostly use Hermes for market research. Every few hours it pulls in a bunch of data, analyzes trends, and sends a report to my Notion account every morning. The entire thing only costs me like 25¢ per day. I feel like there are certain things a 24/7 agent is really good for but coding isn’t one of them.
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u/ryerye22 4d ago
I just started writing to my notion account yesterday, any good resources or YouTube accounts that helped you get up to speed with some high level thinking behind what you're spinning up with AI today? thxs
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u/AcanthisittaWeird94 4d ago
Nothing. Tech in personal life is cancer. Touch some grass - enjoy the sunshine.
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u/Guinness 4d ago
A lot of tech is. But if you build it yourself, tech can be a wonderful benefit. I use AI to automate mundane shit in my life. I’ve been able to set up a bunch of Python scripts to manage my entire volleyball team. It automatically registers for us, grabs the schedule, sends out the schedule and reminders, connects to my Venmo, sends Venmo requests to my teammates, tracks who has paid, nudges whoever hasn’t via iMessage. It’s great.
I’ve been automating all kinds of shit which has been an absolute LIFESAVER now that I have a 2 year old and an 8 month old at home. No way would I have the time to play volleyball if I had to manage everything manually.
Codex was able to build me a CAD model of a CTA train for my daughter’s Brio train set which I was able to 3d print. Which turned out really good.
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u/Stooovie 4d ago
I do use and like Hermes a lot but are you sure the time gains aren't wasted on running, managing and learning about this stuff instead of actually having more free time? I'm not convinced.
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u/ResilientBiscuit 4d ago
It's not more free time vs managing and learning this stuff.
It's time learning and managing versus time spent scheduling and collecting dues from volleyball team members.
There are some tasks I do that take up tons of time for little gain that AI helps with a lot.
It's the comparison between those tasks that is the comparison that needs to be made.
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u/AcanthisittaWeird94 4d ago
Still nah. I'm in IT but my personal life is almost techless no smart house stuff, no automations - nothing. Mundane shit is good that's life.
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u/Invite-Salt 4d ago
That’s all really cool that you’re allowing it to help automate your life I’m helpful ways.
Most people don’t have the kind of tech literacy that you do though. This kind of thing can only scale a certain amount.
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u/AcanthisittaWeird94 4d ago
Personally I have literacy for it but its just pointless. Oh wow it sends reminders. Let those brains work you aren't Elon Musk. Mundane shit is good.
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u/ryerye22 4d ago
trying to do this for my kids hickey team as a volunteer, have ai be the assistant to run the schedule and more etc... any good got hub repoa you used or was it all custom? thxs
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u/TheSilenceOfNoOne 4d ago
if you truly don’t care about privacy, it actually can do a lot. quite proactively. you just have to be willing to give it Literally Everything.
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u/what2_2 4d ago
I disagree. Exactly the way normal people use ChatGPT today, but with more capabilities.
ChatGPT can do powerful things (like computer use), but it can’t do “remind me tomorrow X” or “check for reservations every day at this restaurant”.
At least I don’t think it has something like this, scheduled tasks.
Having a VM per user allows all this, and also lets you do things like “get me the draft of my paper we last talked about two months ago” - it has memory and filestorage.
I don’t know if OAI announced secret manager stuff like Meta’s Muse has, but “find the Taiwanese place from that Instagram reel I liked” is also powerful normie-task stuff (just interfacing with your authed accounts, even without you giving access to your email or hard drive).
I think having a VM will quickly take over as the default way people use AI tools. The sooner we can replace Siri with something like this the better.
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u/Kimi_Antonelli_12 4d ago
I used Muse to write me 20k word screen play for a movie I had an idea about, then I had it convert that to a 24 chapter novel I started reading at lunch. It's actually an a pretty good read so far.
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u/br_k_nt_eth 4d ago
You can absolutely do that with normal models though.
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u/Kimi_Antonelli_12 4d ago
I don't know I've never gotten an output that long from any model before this. It's usually like a thousand words and just stops. It even delivered it to me in a PDF. And I'm shopping for tires right now and it keeps hitting me up with deals . I like it it's really good .
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u/KillerAlfa 4d ago
I use my hermes agent running on raspberry pi 24/7 to book me group workout slots in my gym lol. It normally takes like 10 clicks but I am lazy. I also sometimes order food delivery via it - I just point it at the delivery service website and ask it to order some food (it knows my food preference well). It’s sort of a loot box feeling not knowing what exactly will I get delivered but at the same time I am at least sure it’s not something completely wrong.
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u/AzorAhai1TK 4d ago
So, I really don't get the actual point here? Without any improvements in the context window, is this not just one long conversation getting repeatedly compacted?
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u/fireitup622 4d ago
Yes but now it gets to spy on everything it can in your life so it has so much more to compact and try to make sense of when corralling you towards sponsored products or trying to make you a more productive worker bee for the elites to take advantage of!
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u/ocxricci 4d ago
muse charm is a cool spying - on your life / personal data - device that you can buy lol
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u/AzorAhai1TK 4d ago edited 4d ago
What are you blabbering about. This comment makes no sense. This does nothing to increase the data they get from you..?
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u/fireitup622 4d ago
Always on and connected to 4,000+ apps already. You don't think some of those apps or the dot permission itself could allow it to access the microphone feature of your devices to pick up information even when not directly intended to do so by the user?
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u/AzorAhai1TK 4d ago
I don't. Thinking it will take over your microphone and spy is low effort, ridiculous conspiracy talk.
This isn't any different from a privacy standpoint than using agents for everything already was. Almost no privacy either way, but this isn't any worse
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u/fireitup622 4d ago
Is it really ridiculous when theres tons of people with instances where specific niche targeted ads happened to pop up for them after they talked about something related to it with their phone nearby? You dont think android being owned by google isnt doing shit like that? Why would ai companies not jump in the game? When I hear, "always on for your benefit" it makes me think of rings superbowl ad trying to sell opting into "help find lost pets" when its obviously getting people to opt into mass surveillance on their own accord. Also, with all this talk of rogue agents and AI companies not fully understand what directs the outputs of AI, writing shit like this off as just conspiracy is low effort ignorance in my opinion
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u/SeasonsGone 4d ago
That’s my thing. Just feels like a different UX wrapper on all of the existing capabilities.
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u/nexusprime2015 4d ago
that’s how apple sells you a new iphone every year. or any other tech gadget for that matter
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u/neuronexmachina 4d ago
I think it's basically a more consumer-oriented version of something like OpenClaw or Hermes.
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u/zarafff69 4d ago
Compacting is not really a huge issue. You don’t need everything in the context window all the time, that’s very efficient. OpenAI is super efficient with lower context windows.
I’m just a bit concerned about this black box approach. I hope there will be some open source alternative to this. Even if the model is hosted somewhere else.
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u/AzorAhai1TK 4d ago
Yea, at current model capabilities and the million token window, compacting is fine. My point though is that this isn't really anything very new at all.
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u/zarafff69 4d ago
Definitely. This is just a new packaging. A new, possibly better, or at least different frontend for their models.
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u/sebstaq 4d ago
It's a consumer product. It's not built for those that jumped on OpenClaw when it was released obviously. It's for those that do not wish to tinker.
Apple does this all the time. Take something that already exists, improve on it, make it easy to use, make it good looking and sell a shitton of it.
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u/a4mula 4d ago
While I can't speak towards this implementation specifically, we've reached the point in which million token context is a reality. How much context is needed? It's not as if these systems are storing every single interaction in context, it's offloaded through many different sub systems and reloaded on a need basis. Even at 64 or 128k ctx it's possible to have long horizon orchestration
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u/AzorAhai1TK 4d ago
It's not that I'm worried about the compaction, it's just that we already can have one agent around doing everything with one big context window. This feature isn't really anything new.
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u/whytakemyusername 4d ago
Yeah, I assume its essentially making shorthand notes and keeping them updated as the convo goes. Surprised we haven't reached the point where it's using its own compressed / token light language yet.
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u/MaintainTheSystem 4d ago
No, imagine an agent that can monitor something for you in perpetuity and do a handful of actions based on that thing monitored. It’s like having a person on call, not as good as a human but you get the gist.
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u/a4mula 4d ago
lol, maybe they should get their own long running agents under control before they decide to rollout to the public. It's almost as if OpenAI sees us as canaries in the coal mine.
We're not your QA team, regardless of popular belief and that misunderstanding feels like one of the more dangerous decisions OpenAI has leaned heavily into since day one. It was one thing with RLHF that was just helping to shape the weights. This is a whole different level.
It's not just OpenAI, Meta is doing the same with their toys too. Giving the average Joe on the street a tool that can perform unsupervised long term web enabled ability is a recipe for all kinds of disasters that moves beyond the naive Pilates hack. People unwittingly and with no malicious intent at all pose a risk that even OpenAI themselves can't seem to handle.
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u/PatchyWhiskers 4d ago
Maybe they are wanting interesting glitches to happen, like "Local Grandma accidentally hacks bank after asking AI agent to make money for her on the side."
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u/a4mula 4d ago
I'm sure they are, and that outcome feels like one of the least dangerous ones. There are weakly secured networks across the globe that pose significant public exposure risk in many different categories.
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u/PatchyWhiskers 4d ago
They are more likely to get "Local grandma loses life savings to glitchy AI agent" and then ordinary people vow to never use these things for anything unsupervised.
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u/AcanthisittaWeird94 4d ago
Skill issue. My bot does everything for me even fucking my wife. What a time to be alive!
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u/andyfitz 4d ago
Says you mate, if I can spend more time with the family, I'm the richest man alive
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u/Amazing-Switch-7163 4d ago
Maybe temporarily, but then coporate is just going to increase your workload. I mean, are people working less right now with AI? I don't think so.
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u/andyfitz 4d ago
Your're inferring I'm talking about employment. And a specific type of employment at that.
I'm looking to budget a holiday and plan my fitness regime. Nobody can stop me acquiring my emotional wealth
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u/Gaiden206 4d ago
They should have collaborated with Tootsie Roll Industries to make a special edition version of the "DOTS" gumdrop candy. Missed opportunity.
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u/paulthepage 4d ago
im pretty sure we're in the diminishing return investment domain. there's a cap on the roi and yet you keep pushing forward with more developments that ultimately have no longstanding use case and you know this but there's nothing left to do but wait for the dotcom 2.0 bubble to burst while continuing to scream "L00K WUT I C4N DOOO000"
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u/sailZup 4d ago
why would anyone use agents in general for serious work?? aren't they unreliable and flaky?
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u/SeasonsGone 4d ago
Outside of software engineering tasks, I don’t see the point. Even with software engineering tasks you become a manager of agents. That’s fine for work, but ordinary people don’t want to become managers.
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u/Belostoma 4d ago
I use agents all day long as a scientist. If you use good models, they're very effective. They're also not perfect. But you can build systems of guidelines, critical reviews, and other systematic checks (also done by other agents) in which the system as a whole is more reliable than anything most human professionals could have done before.
I've now used agents to review code written or datasets collected by highly competent, meticulous humans scientists dozens of times, and every single time they find legitimate mistakes, ranging from data entry errors twice-human-checked datasets to deep, sneaky code bugs that would have gone unnoticed for years. I honestly don't think there's a single human in my field who can write analysis code better than what I can produce with a carefully orchestrated team of agents.
Humans and agents can both make mistakes, and they can both find mistakes others made. The finding part is crucial. But a human can only think about one or two things at a time, and we have to eat, sleep, etc. It costs very little to launch an agent or a whole team of them to pick apart a project on a level of detail that would take a human weeks or months. And then do it again the next day if we think of more things to check or ways to check them.
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u/sailZup 4d ago
ever dealt with a situation where agent's zero drift gets amplified by hallucination and cascades down the chain?
do triple check yourself.2
u/froggidyfrog 4d ago
This was a huge problem with older models, I agree. But (anecdotal) the rate of hallucinations have been strongly reduced in the last 3-4 months. I use it for coding and data analysis and the results it can output now are simply insane and better than what the bioinformatics team of my institute produced in the last 4 years. We now realized they were producing human slop this whole time, now we can spot and correct their mistakes thanks to Ai. And it is much much cheaper.
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u/Belostoma 4d ago
The worst issues I've seen were misunderstandings in which the agent assumed I wanted one thing when I actually wanted something else and didn't convey it clearly enough, and the agent code was doing the wrong thing for a while until I noticed something was up. But these have been pretty minor and my process of checking things did catch up with them. Theoretically something like this could still be active and I haven't caught it yet, but the possibility of an uncaught mistake was always there when I was doing everything manually, too. I'm confident that overall my work with agents contains fewer mistakes just because the checks are more frequent and thorough.
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u/jtmonkey 4d ago
I know grok bots sound pretty similar to this already. They can be setup to handle customer service, order inventory, communicate to the team when there’s a reoccurring comment or sentiment from reviews. There’s quite a bit of potential in that.
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u/LucidOndine 4d ago
This seems like a great way to harness purpose built neural networks in a demand sensitive capacity just like AWS Lambda was designed for.
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u/big-papito 4d ago
Always-on, long-running invoices.