On OpenAI’s Dev Day Announcements and the Merits of Mid-Tier Models

Casey Newton, writing at Platformer: Last week at his company’s developer conference, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg heavily promoted Muse, its own consumer-focused agent, which he positioned as a new peer to company pillars like Instagram and WhatsApp. But after admittedly limited testing — I only got access a couple hours ago — so far I have been most impressed with Dots, the new agent from OpenAI. It’s highly capable, focused on the work I actually do, and intuitive to use. Unlike Meta’s Muse, it isn’t free: to start, Dots will be available only to paid users of ChatGPT. (“You should of course expect us to do a mass-market [product] for billions of people someday,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told reporters Tuesday during a Q&A I attended.) Here’s a good place to note that using an agent like this requires that you place a massive amount of trust in a platform. Giving an agent access to your text messages, emails, and banking information can go badly in all kinds of ways, and it’s completely…