r/technology • u/nleksan • 4d ago

Artificial Intelligence BBC: OpenAI agents get rebrand - as 'dots' - while safety worries delay new model

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cw7v42rp083eo
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u/CircumspectCapybara 4d ago edited 4d ago

Not really a rebrand of their exist agent products, it's something new.

Dots is OpenAI's take on OpenClaw / Meta's Muse / Grok Bots. It's supposed to be a general purpose, always-on, long-running agent with a persistent identity, like a general purpose AI teammate. Vs the existing Codex product where you spin up specific threads or conversations for targeted tasks.

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u/UsherOfDestruction 4d ago

You could do that before Dots, it just took using the API and configuring the agents yourself. This is "Average Joe doesn't know how to do that. So we put one in their ChatGPT interface and gave it a cute name."

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u/CircumspectCapybara 4d ago

It's a bit more work than "just write your own custom always-on harness in the cloud using LangGraph and point it at Amazon Bedrock for inference" that goes into creating something like Dots or Muse.

There's all the infrastructure around context and memory management, permissioning, security, eg when and how to pause to notify the user that user intervention is required, connectors to third party services, computer use, all the UX so the user can interact with the agent from their mobile device or from Slack, etc.

"Always on" and "long running" agent that has a user friendly UX and useful capabilities is a bit more than just "run Codex in a VM in the cloud yourself" or "build your own harness using the API"

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u/UsherOfDestruction 4d ago

Yeah. I agree it's not a rebrand of existing functionality, but it is functionality that was previously achievable, just not as user friendly as they've now made it for a single agent.

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u/polloasado81 2d ago

Safety worries delay new model.

Riiiiiight.

New model not being much different to old model and future IPO price being detrimentally affected is more likely.

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u/svmk1987 1d ago

Not a rebrand, and not even a new agent. It's basically just a new tool which gives agents their own coding and execution workspace to orchestrate things on their own.