OpenAI held DevDay on 29 September and the headline act was Dots. Picture ChatGPT, except instead of sitting there politely waiting for you to type something it just keeps working. Every Dot gets its own cloud computer and its own browser, plugs into 4,000-odd apps and goes off to do your admin while you pretend to be in a meeting. Book a table. Chase an invoice. Poke at a bug. Open the pull request. Sam Altman called it "the real-deal version of AI that we've always imagined", which is a big claim from a company whose next flagship model was reportedly pulled after failing its own safety tests.
What a Dot actually does
The setup is simple: you hand a Dot a goal, connect the apps, set the permissions and it comes back with finished work for you to approve. Password changes always need a human, which is the AI version of "I'll do everything except the one thing that gets me fired". There is an auto-review layer checking each action against your instructions, and OpenAI's own fine print says Dots can still make mistakes.
Dots run on GPT-6 Astra and work across ChatGPT, Codex and ChatGPT Work, plus Slack, Teams and those 4,000-odd plugin apps.
What it costs and who gets it
The first Dot is included with Pro and Business Premium. Pro now comes in US$100, US$200 and US$500 flavours, and Dot tasks count toward your usage limits. The Pro rollout skips the UK, the EEA and Switzerland for now, but includes Australia. Hooray for my wallet!
Dots was one of 20-plus DevDay announcements. The rest (Space and Pages, the US$500 plan, GPT-6.1 Sol and more) are in The Week Compacted.
My take
I'm excited. I started with OpenClaw and loved the idea, but only 9 or 10 months ago the memory and the models driving it just weren't there yet. These days I'm using Grok Bot, which is similar but different, except it's slow. Even on the lowest US$20 plan I can't get much done before it runs out of steam. Muse would be the obvious one to try, but it's not officially available in Australia. It's US only for now.
Dots has the most potential to be the one people actually use. It's powered by GPT-6 Astra, one of the top-tier models, and it plugs straight into ChatGPT, Codex and ChatGPT Work, so it has more to work with than the other agents. Unlike Europe, Australia isn't on the excluded list, so we get it from day one. The catch: you need ChatGPT Pro at US$100 a month or higher. I haven't had a go yet, so this is a read of the announcement and not a review, but I'm ready to check it out.
So, should you care?
For most people, probably not. You're reading an AI blog, which already puts you in the 1%. If you run your own business, already use ChatGPT and Codex, understood most of what I wrote here and can cope with an AI that glitches now and then, then maybe yes.
If you're an executive who wants a personal AI assistant to organise your travel, reply to your emails or summarise your day, that's a maybe. The idea isn't the problem. Getting it set up and working properly is. That's where I come in, so send me a brief.
End of the day, this will cost you at least US$100 a month (about A$145 at today's rate), plus the time to set it up (or use my services) and get it running without bugs.