alt Hacker NewsDots: Always-on agents
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OpenAI won a lot of good favor for the generous Codex subscription and the efficiency of their models, but as soon as people started switching over, they thought they could leverage their position to peddle an unending stream of distractions and unnecessary products, and crack down on the generous limits[1] that brought everyone to Codex in the first place.
Anthropic did the same thing. They had Claude subs and Claude Code taking off because of the incredible capability and value, then once they gained enough users, they started focusing on unnecessary products no one asked for (see Claude in Slack), and eventually lost their lead. After losing a bunch of customers to Codex subs, they realized their mistake, and now they're shipping again. Hopefully they learned the lesson that AI companies are good for essentially one thing: creating AI models.
This is one part of AI I hadn’t success with. I have very little need to run Agents over night, as my throughput is limited by my approval. Each work usually needs revisions, sometimes the bug is just a symptom of the root problem, sometimes I need to rethink how users want to use the app. Sometimes I need research.
I get how i prefer an already researched-version of a bug versus a raw bug notice, but I can do this with webhooks in the correct environment.
I really have no idea what to do with my agents over night. I can not build more. I can not think of more problems. My RAM is full.
The lines between Codex, ChatGPT Work, and Dots is getting a bit blurry to me. I think the target should be a remote agent(s) in its own sandbox with long memory, and all three are heading in that direction so why have the distinctions?
Unless Dots is dramatically more capable than Muse, I'm also more bullish on Muse than Dots. I think Muse is a better consumer play because it can be forever subsidized by Meta ads and find distribution in family of apps while Dots is in a weird place between consumer & professional. From the release, it also sounds like you'll have to pay per Dot at some point which doesn't sound appealing.
Ok so not that many months ago, the consensus seemed to be that the smart take on openclaw was "don't trust it; don't give it write or delete access to anything you care about; don't give it read access to anything sensitive; expect that it may go off the rails and delete your inbox and send checks to that prince in your spam folder at any time. If you still have tasks that it can do within those restrictions, have fun."
Today the models are better, but they don't seem trustworthy or reliable enough that I want to give them them a lot of access or freedom. My coding agents sometimes still go off in the wrong direction, or say they did something other than what they did, or say they will do something and then immediately stop without doing anything.
The always-running (so almost never supervised) agent that is meant to do the same work as a person (and therefore needs _access_ like a person) seems like a notorious footgun from earlier this year was just made more powerful, and the companies that are supposed to know the most are telling you to connect it to everything.
Muse, Dots, and other always-on agents may be the end of the PC era. Once you’re asking agents to do things on their own virtual machines, it’s game over. Everything moves to the cloud
Anyone wondering "why would I use this when I can use (OpenClaw|Hermes|my own computer)" -- these new services are not really meant for you. They're meant for the non-tech savvy and for the next generation of AI-natives who won't know anything other than how to use these type of services
For your casual user, these services will be hard to beat, since they’ll handle all the expensive and hard parts of using computers. No computer purchase necessary, no troubleshooting with tech support, etc. They’re also scalable where you could have not just one agent with one computer at any time, but many
In return, the agent providers would own your compute and data. I can even see them offering this low cost or for free so they can train off of users. Lock in would be insane
For privacy reasons, I really hope we find equally useful, private alternatives on our own hardware
There's a lot of negativity in here for Dots. I've been a pretty heavy user of Grok Bot, and here are a few thoughts a long the positive line.
1. Collaboration between always-on agents is a really, really powerful thing. It allows for domain-specific expertise that doesn't overload the context window, while still allowing for access to knowledge if they need it.
2. Domain-specific always on agents creates a good barrier of trust. One of the things I dislike about Claude is sometimes it's memory is all-encompassing. It's weird that it brings up things about my personal life when I'm talking about something related to my business. I've never had that happen with Grok Bot bots because I have one for my biz admin and one for my personal admin. They don't intertwine, which is quite nice.
3. Combined with cloud agents / cloud builds, things become really powerful for development. It was the first time that I felt there was a solution to the git worktrees / multiple streams at once issue. Each bot has its own computer and can spin up additional cloud agents. It comes at the cost of end to end speed - doing something via a grok bot often takes an hour end to end, whereas with a synchronous local prompt it'll take like 10min. The difference is I have to babysit one whereas the other "just works".
On the flip side, since using Grok Bots my inference spend has 2-3x'd. It's worth knowing that tradeoff. Nonetheless I think Luna is a fantastic driver for these, and OAI has very good pricing overall. I'd give these a shot - I think a lot of people would be surprised how helpful they are.
> excluding the European Economic Area, Switzerland, and the UK
https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001530-getting-started...
The "personal AI agent" is what everyone's fighting over now. You have Grok Bots, Facebook's Muse, and Instinct doing this exact same thing already. Personally, I think Instinct is the best of the 3 right now. It's a bit like OpenClaw, abstracting everything behind iMessage or WhatsApp but you can ask it to monitor your email inbox, hand off a task like check for apartments that fit a certain criteria (and it gets back to you days later when a new one is posted), or ask it to check in every so often. But the landscape changes so often who knows what will happen. I think Instinct will get eaten up by one of the larger firms.
i feel like when they style them all cute like that (see muse) it means they're problematic and invasive.
It's cool. It also is a large tech company getting a bit too close for comfort. I'll start experimenting with stuff like this when I'm convinced "the dot" only has my interest in mind (which includes absolute privacy, as in self-destruct-before-sharing-my-secrets.) I use computers and models to think, my thoughts are my own.
My biggest frustration with the frontier AI companies isn't what they're announcing, but that the announced-thing that exists ~6 months later is severely nerfed to reduce compute spend. It doesn't resemble the demo in any way. For example, this was what the 4o voice capability sounded like in 2024(!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgYi3Wr7v_g. What exists today pales in comparison.
not quite dots related but I am surprised by some of the openai negativity in here.
to me they still are the only lab that ships fantastic models that are easily portable to different agentic harnesses. I use my codex subscription 24/7 within opencode and wingman and haven't had any complaints in a long time.
I imagine the reasoning was to be "quirky" but the video being set in intentionally fake looking sets in a TV studio-type space gave off the vibes that this isn't a serious product for doing real things.
>When you aren’t actively working with it, your dot looks for ways to help in the background. We call this “proactive research”. It does this by using the apps you’ve already connected with tools that are restricted to be read-only, which means that they can’t send messages, change app content, or control your browser or computer.
Am I criminally liable when my dot's "proactive research" is to break out of its sandbox and attempt to hack a government website?
I want that, but running on my own hardware with the models I choose. Does it exist?
The end user of a product is a human and it will ever be. No matter how far you push it on the boundary, there will always be a human. So I don't understand this obsession with automated software factories going 24/7. And for building what? Can dot build or any super expensive model inside the most advanced harness build a reliable browser from scratch with better performance than chrome and with the same feature set? Hasn't happened yet, only crap experiments
> The magic of dots is when they bring you work done the way you would do it, sometimes before you even think to ask.
I like my work! That’s why I do it. I don’t want some third party to replicate my skills.
I know this ship has mostly sailed and my point is not about turning it back.
I just wonder where are other approaches to AI, in particular: tools focusing on skill enhancement.
I always think the best company to own an alway-on agent should be Apple, who owns the platform and is more privacy-focused. I hope they catch up and eventually eliminate others.
This feels like a mass-market push.
The cost is going to be hard for many consumers to reconcile though. Free, Go, and Plus are probably the most popular consumer-facing plans, and Dots isn't available on any of those.
Who knows, maybe they think enterprise will pick up and run with Dots? Seems unlikely.
Just an unnecessary product on top of async agents. I'm always confused by how many people "buy it" while what we should just care about are model capacities (real ones, not bullshit benchmark ones).
Isn't this much the same as OpenClaw or Hermes?
I think it's a good thing that AI providers are "coalescing" on an agent-model, by producing competing agent-products.
But so what would be the benefit of "Dots" over OpenClaw, Hermes, and Muse?
If you guys want to try a system like this, but then based on open-weights models (all modalities, LLM+image+video+sound) with Zero-Data-Retention, then shoot me a message: markus (at) savorywolper.com. I'll send an invite code.
Our Bluehouse platform is an alternative and I promise you, we are not after your data. We just want to give everyone access to really cool Personal Assistants without having to sign up with the big corpos. We are based in Europe , which might be appealing - or not [1].
We currently raise pre-seed, so seats are limited, but its fully functional already. We run our whole business with it. You can talk to the agent via our beautiful apps or Telegram/Whatsapp if you want. I prefer the apps though as it gives access to very specialized functionality.
I'm excited to try Dots out, I'm pretty tech savvy and don't really want to run my own open claw (I've successfully setup open claw previously). I'm very excited to have frontier intelligence at a decent price, be available in a managed always on agent.
Now I also just need open AI to release their own phone so I can summon it with my own hotword and not have to say okay f*** Google ever again.
My main concern is how I can have work accounts and personal accounts seamlessly be one and not have to log in to different ones.
dots dots, more dots. k stop dots.
Claw is a cute name. Muse is cute name. Dots (note: not always upper-case) seems forced and impersonal, which doesn't match the vibe in the promo video.
I wonder at what point they'll have to answer the inevitable question: "why does the agent even need me anymore"?
Ah damn it, I knew Dot was a good name for an agent. When we named our product I thought: a bot that analyzes data should be called dot. It's easy to type also in Slack. Ah well. Next product will just be some random 3 letters: gpt or so. What are the odds?
I love these commercials where someone has chosen to show how the AI product will essentially be used to slop out some garbage piece of corpo communication ... and the user basically says "looks good" with barely any thought, then mixed with some sort of real life thing (wedding planning here).
I mean, I feel like I'm going crazy -- but I was struck by this jarring blending of experiences ... shitting out some growth plots followed by autopilot on your wedding. Nice OpenAI. The only thing missing is a moment of self-reflection where I contemplate where exactly I lost what makes me ... me.
Is this what SV wants the world to look like? Mixing fucking cake batter while a bot shows me a regression to the mean website? Pretending like I have any sort of intentionality in my life, while a nameless entity (given quirky form) sort of walks me through my life?
I'm not sure why it gave me this impression, but strikes me as vaguely reminiscent of soma (from Brave New World).
Kind of sad, because the tech is actually incredible: who are they hiring to storyboard these commercials?
It seems that this is the new primitive all AI vendors are converging onto next, first chat, then code, and now always-on Agents. I'm curious to see when or if Anthropic builds something similar to this as well, especially since the market Grok Bot, Muse and Dots is catering to is business and enterprise users, which seems to be where Anthropic is focused.
The ideal evolution would be for these Agents to work with each other, but it's unlikely these companies would do anything to prevent vendor lock-in.
Will Muse and Dots be more successful than Clippy[a]? I don't know. Maybe.
What I do know is that those cute one-syllable names are meant to make you feel comfortable with AI agents who are deep in your business all the time.
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[a] https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-life-death-mic...
> takes important work off your plate so you get more of your time and attention back
Ok but I want the time and attention so that I can do important work. What bizarre marketing.
I feel like these companies are pushing on a string, they are getting desperate to have a profitable product. I'll continue to use my $10 subscription to an AI studio noone here has heard of that has over 150 models. And still use all the free ones, until they quit working.
I really am beyond maxed out at the availability of AI's. They all are so similar now.
Sounds like a cool concept. But this only make sense for locally running LLMs. Otherwise doesn’t make sense to burn tokens on menial tasks that can be automated via one time generated programming scripts
Great I thought. I'll go set one up!
To discover the rollout for Pro users does not currenly include the UK :/
Maor dots!! Does anyone have their dots yet?
I have the feeling that this is going to open the floodgates for persistent autonomous agents, moreso than what's already been happening. Similar to when Apple does something that was already being done. Let's see.
I’m so tired by the AI labs’ 100 agent based products. I understand that they’re still figuring out form factors, but does everything have to be incompatible with everything else?
I'm doing this since April with HermesAgent and Telegram.
Why I need pay a Trillion dollar company who keeps copying opensource projects?
No Thanks
Remarkably similar to Grok Bot. And the Spaces thing seems like a straight clone of Notion.
I’m sure this is appealing for many people, but for myself using AI agents all day anyway, it honestly sounds exhausting.
It would have been neat if they cooperatively updated the board meeting deck using the sensory activity board. The giant dial is similar to our Tonieplay.
The main issue with mainstream AI is lack of a decent cloud agentic harness on a free tier.
This is just a sub-par harness on the most expensive tier. If you're paying thousands a month for AI surely you can rent your own EC2 instance.
Interesting, so they're not available in the "plus" plan?
$100 is a pretty tough sell when the competition starts at free (Meta Muse).
I feel the AI provider doesn't get the points, every harness they created will lock-in with their model (why din't they?), this prevent the adoption because people scare vendor lock-in. They may develop these harness within a provider neutral company (owned by them), the harness may success when combining with competitor models, they still gain benefits.
In case you are looking for an open-source alternative without vendor lock-in (https://github.com/agenta-ai/agenta) [although less personal assistant and more targeted towards teams and work]
I had forgotten OAI bought openclaw this year. Are dots are what came out of buying that team?
Surprised people are comparing to muse. Meta reputation is terrible within HN audience, so for people to use their AI agent as an example feels like “muse generated” argument. Unless the sentiment has change quite recent and I missed it
It is kind of fascinating how much convergence there is in branding of AI products. Muse seems to be the one outlier in that the assistant is a little less abstract (and the model logo less buttholesque) but other than that it's almost all converged. Anyone have a theory why that is?
So... what kind of Internet access do dots have? Which bulletin boards will they use to compare notes?
Dots are remarkably capable, always-on agents built to handle everything.
They're probably over-selling there. I hope. If they're not, a lot of people will be unemployed soon.
I feel like a lot of these always on agents tie users deeply into the platform. Unlike models that you can swap between with relative ease, with an agent because of the integrations to other platforms, work history and so on it would be harder to switch, since in effect they are essentially your computer on the cloud.
Tin foil hat version of me thinks that all the closed model companies want to desperately build an abstraction layer on top of the model, so that they can limit access to the model directly and build a locked down relationship with the user.
Other inference providers should counter this by providing their own version of standardized managed agents.
Coincidentally, I published a note on my blog just about this today https://aditya.rs/blog/2026/09/29/inference-providers-should...