Why OpenAI’s DevDay Looked Like Catch-Up

While the rest of us were distracted by details within Anthropic’s IPO filing and OpenAI’s plans to raise $30 billion in a new round that could value it around $1.4 trillion, app developers on Tuesday flooded to San Francisco’s Fort Mason for OpenAI’s annual developer conference, where it made a flurry of new product and feature announcements.

All in all, OpenAI’s DevDay felt a bit reactionary. Take “Dots,” an always-on or persistent agent product—which we broke news about earlier this month—that promises to automate complex processes like turning customer feedback into improvements for an app or filling out invoices for employees. 

In case you’re counting, this is OpenAI’s fifth attempt to launch an agent product, counting past tries like Operator, Deep Research, ChatGPT Agent and ChatGPT Work. The company said that this time was different, though, because of how good frontier AI like Astra has become (and they might be right!). 

Dots looks similar to recent breakout agent products like Instinct, Meta Platforms’ Muse and SpaceX’s Grok Bot, which allow people to talk to agents through text and calls. To be fair, though, OpenAI’s version felt distinctly productivity- and work-focused compared to some of these other examples, especially with features like having Dots work together to create documents and presentations. (Separately, can anyone tell me how to test out all these different agent products? I’m personally overwhelmed.)