YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Dots: Always-on agents

208 points alvis 59 minutes ago 113 comments

minimaxir 56 minutes ago | parent

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.

dstroot 54 minutes ago | parent

OpenAI is so good at marketing and naming (e.g., "ChatGPT").

foolfoolz 52 minutes ago | parent

ChatGPT is a perfectly cromulent name

zahrevsky 51 minutes ago | parent

I guess they are just stuck with this name, as originally this was a research project “Chat with GPT” to try to use a GPT model to generate assistant's chat messages.

IshKebab 49 minutes ago | parent

ChatGPT was named before anyone realised it would become so well known, and by the time it was it was too late. It's not like BERT is an amazing name either.

nba456_ 46 minutes ago | parent

Muse is a cute name?

jeffgreco 36 minutes ago | parent

Claw is a cute name?

giarc 33 minutes ago | parent

The muse character is cute, muse the name is not.

therealdrag0 21 minutes ago | parent

Muse is a fantastic name. Cuteness is debatable

tancop 1 minute ago | parent

A muse is someone who gives you inspiration and is always there when you need them most. Muse the agent has personalized home screen suggestions as a main feature and is always online.

It's also short, gender neutral, not a human name (unless you're nonbinary because they can get wild), easy to pronounce and sounds good. This is what happens when your marketing department is one of the best in the world.

S0y 38 minutes ago | parent

Watch the tail!

jason_zig 52 minutes ago | parent

i feel like when they style them all cute like that (see muse) it means they're problematic and invasive.

minimaxir 49 minutes ago | parent

Muse makes sense since it targets the general normies. Dots explicitly are targeting developers instead which makes it a bit weird.

walthamstow 45 minutes ago | parent

Dots seem to me to be for the rest of general knowledge work and not specifically developers

rolosa 27 minutes ago | parent

Requires $100/month minimum, are non-developers paying that?

gk1 18 minutes ago | parent

Of course they are. Why wouldn’t they?

- non-developer

sunaurus 47 minutes ago | parent

I mean the fact that it's not available in the EU is a pretty big tell

SwabbyNat74 46 minutes ago | parent

Does no one remember the MS Paperclip?!?

zdragnar 41 minutes ago | parent

Or how much paperclip was abhorred?

Marha01 7 minutes ago | parent

That's because it was pretty much a useless gimmick. If it was a capable AI assistant like Astra, it woudn't have been abhorred.

qntmfred 43 minutes ago | parent

you don't have to give yourself up to irrational, anxious feelings.

bko 43 minutes ago | parent

I think they're just meant to be friendly. I don't think it's that deep. They're useful and not scary and its marketing is meant to project that image.

Lalabadie 33 minutes ago | parent

Just like they always present Astra as useful and not scary?

HeavenFox 51 minutes ago | parent

What a terrible marketing page. I read it a few times and still have zero idea what this thing is.

zahrevsky 47 minutes ago | parent

Agreed. Also, when I open a page about an app I want to see it's screenshots first, not some ad.

algoth1 44 minutes ago | parent

It's openclaw powered by chatgpt

apetresc 41 minutes ago | parent

It's hosted OpenClaw.

maherbeg 1 minute ago | parent

It's a work oriented Muse if you're familiar with Muse. A single thread abstraction to manage your work and delegate to other threads.

vb-8448 50 minutes ago | parent

They finally managed to get rid of project, middle and top managers!

Next natural step: CEOs staring tens of dots to control other humans and agents XD

Trasmatta 20 minutes ago | parent

In actuality, it feels a lot more like project and middle managers getting rid of ICs

I can feel it in the air, every single software business is itching to get rid of as many developers as possible, and move everything to their PMs. Hiring has already almost completely stopped, and some have already started the layoffs. More will come.

jesse_dot_id 50 minutes ago | parent

Nope. If an AI agent can't intuit how I will feel about an action it's taking on my behalf, I'm not give it access to my digital life. OpenClaw, Muse, Dots... doesn't matter which one. All are an equally awful idea.

dylanhouli 43 minutes ago | parent

I agree. I don't feel comfortable giving AI access to my entire computer or phone...not sure that will ever change. Seeing people give that access to agents without any sort of sandboxing blows my mind.

The idea of having an AI assistant help you with all aspects of life is cool and futuristic, but idk, I'm still just out here using a chatbot interface and doing fine.

dstroot 50 minutes ago | parent

Pro plan only for now.

astrodust 47 minutes ago | parent

Excluding some countries, listed as "markets excluding the European Economic Area, Switzerland, and the UK" but possibly Canada, too?

goda90 49 minutes ago | parent

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.

floatrock 43 minutes ago | parent

Or if we take the metaphor literally: any space you operate in is merely a stage for the AI's.

It's a perfect communication of vibes, it's just the AIs' vibes not yours.

dgellow 49 minutes ago | parent

I cannot fathom how much compute will be wasted with that type of always on agentic systems

rglover 41 minutes ago | parent

Forget the compute, what about the energy (and other resource) requirements?

hankbond 49 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

floatrock 45 minutes ago | parent

nah now you can review your website designs while cooking dinner.

It's not giving any of your time and attention back, it's selling a world where your attention is always captured by some pavlovian app ping.

Ambient intelligence is only useful with ambient attention capture.

gk1 16 minutes ago | parent

Some important work is fun to do, some isn’t.

cartersj 48 minutes ago | parent

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.

rolosa 27 minutes ago | parent

It's not reaching mass market if it's gated behind a $100/month plan

cousinbryce 17 minutes ago | parent

People who are bad with money is a big market. Maybe they’re using the Burts Bees strategy

therealdrag0 23 minutes ago | parent

Oh wow I assumed it’d be available for cheap/free mass market like Muse is. Strange.

sanex 15 minutes ago | parent

It's powered by Astra who will blow through your $20 plan in about 10 minutes

preommr 6 minutes ago | parent

Incredibly obvious to anyone paying attention.

Altman shared a post yesterday that basically (I am ovrsimplifying) covered how the best coding, fastest, smartest models is less relevant than building generalist models because that's what builds a platform. Lots of reasons why, like how there's no stickiness for models which is a problem for monetization. They're also using these generalist models to then distill down to make other variants for specialized purposes.

So everything is about getting that huge collection of data and generalization.

jdw64 47 minutes ago | parent

I heard they use GPT Space (like Notion) together with Slack and use it like a human colleague, but watching the actual demo video, the speed is so slow it's shocking..

glub 47 minutes ago | parent

So essentially, another attempt at giving codex to regular people.

jesse_dot_id 46 minutes ago | parent

The only reasons I can think for OpenAI and Meta to make their always-on agents cute little cartoons are all nefarious in nature.

guywithahat 37 minutes ago | parent

It could be to market more towards women, who they may have both independently determined aren't paying for AI as much. I don't have any data to go one way or another but I can imagine lots of reasons to make the agent cute that aren't nefarious

therealdrag0 26 minutes ago | parent

What’s nefarious about attracting users?

duplessitous 21 minutes ago | parent

Really, none? Was Microsoft nefarious when they deployed Clippy? I feel like there is an incredibly obvious reason that is not nefarious at all: the average consumer likes cute things

jpnc 16 minutes ago | parent

> Was Microsoft nefarious when they deployed Clippy?

Yes. It was predictive programming for getting (paper)clipped by AI.

tavavex 7 minutes ago | parent

People are already doing most of the work of anthropomorphising LLMs, so OpenAI is just capitalizing on that. Drawing a face on it will make people even more attached to the LLM, they will treat it even more like a person. If they ever get desperate for money they could change the cancel flow to have the cute character plead not to die, and play a cartoony animation of its death when the subscription is canceled. It would stop at least a few users.

tinyhouse 44 minutes ago | parent

One way that I find the AI space boring is that everyone is working on the same things. The release of Jev was a breath of fresh air.

gh0stcat 41 minutes ago | parent

How about the fact that anthropic and openai's product pages are the exact same thing, down to text bullet points. They're the same thing, only able to copy each other, only able to optimize to some vague mean.

https://chatgpt.com/#pricing https://claude.com/pricing

It all just looks the same. I get that this isn't the technical details, but it just sends this message that everyone is copying each other all the time, this is the best way to organize a pricing page, etc. Just a weird, eerie feeling.

tinyhouse 38 minutes ago | parent

To Anthropic's credit, I find their overall design so much better than OpenAI's.

rolosa 24 minutes ago | parent

Are they not releasing a Jev competitor as well?

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Decisions API Decisions API enables real-time decision-making by focusing Luna's intelligence on a specific set of user-defined questions with finite pre-defined answers. Developers supply context using text or images, and get back answers they can use to classify content, route requests, or choose an agent’s next action.

Available in limited preview today with a broad release planned in the coming days.

ranyume 43 minutes ago | parent

It's great to see that my personal assistant can stop working and maybe report me to the police if the company disagrees with what I'm doing!

intrasight 36 minutes ago | parent

> It's great to see that my personal assistant can stop working and maybe report me to the police

That part has always been true

cousinbryce 22 minutes ago | parent

You need to hire better assistants

intrasight 8 minutes ago | parent

Or have the ability to issue a pardon

ranyume 5 minutes ago | parent

My flesh assistant would never. In fact they would cheer me on if I tell them I got a gun just for Dario [1].

https://sfstandard.com/2026/09/04/anthropic-threat-claude-sf...

Trasmatta 15 minutes ago | parent

Or if the agent literally just hallucinates a crime

Opus 5.5 decided to just randomly `pkill` everything on my laptop the other day. Jailbreaking models is still easy AF. Every single release like this brags about their "safeguards", but none of it really works at the end of the day.

rvshchwl 41 minutes ago | parent

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.

wxw 41 minutes ago | parent

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.

larodi 36 minutes ago | parent

Different UIs targeting audiences of various background, considering their knowledge of AI, wrapped in the correct medium the target would be most likely to embrace. In essence all harness are made the same ... more or less of course.

rolosa 29 minutes ago | parent

Muse is $0/$16/$80 vs Dot being $100/$200/$500 so yeah I don't think Dot is meant for casuals.

LollipopYakuza 25 minutes ago | parent

Is it really about what it offers, or about how each plan are subsidized by Meta and OpenAI?

abirch 20 minutes ago | parent

Meta is probably making money off of Muse. They can sell ads with the information that they glean.

jstummbillig 14 minutes ago | parent

While there are people around here that would still argue Anthropic/OpenAI tokens are "subsidized", I find it much more plausible that Muse tokens are, given Metas strategy of burning money, including on AI models, in hope of making something happen in a market they want to enter.

rolosa 14 minutes ago | parent

Well from my perspective I'm not a developer, $20/month for ChatGPT is the most I'm willing to pay to have access to a top class AI. I happily downloaded Muse to try out to figure out my own personal use case, and it's been pretty good so I could see myself eventually doing the $16/month plan if I need to hit so far the usage is pretty generous.

All this to say that at $100/month it's a complete non-starter.

ModernMech 46 seconds ago | parent

It’s meant for rich casuals. If you watch the presentation, everyone they depicted using it seemed to be in some high paying which collar profession. I.e. it’s for themselves.

OzzyB 17 minutes ago | parent

Because ChatGPT is still trying to capture and own the consumer AI market, and are willing to experiment and abstract their underlying models to do so.

Just look at their SuperBowl/World Cup Ads: Grandmas' talking to ChatGipitee, so cute, so mainstream!

This looks like the new Paperclip helper for a new generation--I guess this is their answer to the (failed?) Jony Ive collab/gizmo, and Muse's cute thingymajib...

The real question to me is: have they lost the coders/terminal bros? And this is their push to stay relevant?

realharo 40 minutes ago | parent

I wonder at what point they'll have to answer the inevitable question: "why does the agent even need me anymore"?

alvis 39 minutes ago | parent

My only complaint to dots is that why their mascots are looking the same as grok bot

ChrisArchitect 39 minutes ago | parent

The long bent shadow of Clippy extends all the way here....... and not sure how they're going to avoid the comparisons and snark on this marketing, at least initially.

Oarch 31 minutes ago | parent

"What's a paperclip?"

- Kids today, probably

holler 38 minutes ago | parent

Does this basically do what Instinct does? (viral text-only agent w/$10B valuation in short notice)

Also why do we need another name for agents? It's getting to be too much...

gk1 14 minutes ago | parent

“Agent” is the type of product, like “car.” “Dot” is the name of the product, like “Helix.”

mindtricks 37 minutes ago | parent

This approach probably wont land well here, but it's still interesting to see each frontier's evolving approach to working with AI.

1-6 34 minutes ago | parent

How does one work when all this stuff keep hitting the feed?

skybrian 33 minutes ago | parent

So... what kind of Internet access do dots have? Which bulletin boards will they use to compare notes?

tracyhenry 32 minutes ago | parent

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.

therealdrag0 24 minutes ago | parent

I agree in spirit. But I’m also most worried about prompt injection attacks given the agent had access to all my stuff, and it seems frontier labs will be best equipt to handle prevention of that.

etchalon 32 minutes ago | parent

At some point a designer is going to come up with a visualization for an agent that isn't "amorphous character blob".

pratio 25 minutes ago | parent

What do people think about the dots video? Seems to be a pattern now.

Revenue increasing 51% YOY, wth. Cake vendor cancels another one is found and an appointment that works has already been scheduled?

Are we so much bothered by the mundane? I feel like that's most of the human experience. If we cut out the time we spend sleeping and working, it's the boring and mundane things that make life beautiful.

softwaredoug 25 minutes ago | parent

So this is like OpenClaw but managed and first class?

ecommerceguy 25 minutes ago | parent

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.

codehorses 1 minute ago | parent

What's the $10 subscription AI studio?

cs702 25 minutes ago | parent

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...

teekert 25 minutes ago | parent

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.

TheAtomic 24 minutes ago | parent

That might be the worst advert I've ever seen. People looking up at childish Ai glow up god beings on huge screens in distinctly childish environments, with cliched decision-makers gasping for West Wing energy...repulsive.

modeless 23 minutes ago | parent

Remarkably similar to Grok Bot. And the Spaces thing seems like a straight clone of Notion.

AlfredBarnes 20 minutes ago | parent

Muse and now Dot's emergence in popularity makes me think Apple's "lil Finder" will be their take on it.

jdoliner 20 minutes ago | parent

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?

thomasahle 17 minutes ago | parent

Do Dots replace OpenClaw?

jdlyga 15 minutes ago | parent

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.

randypewick 12 minutes ago | parent

always on agents are an obvious step: they need more data to grow and improve their models. humans learn continuously and we are always on, why should an agent be any different? I have no problem with this kind of tech, but I do have problems with the company, so, thank you, but no thank you.

Imnimo 10 minutes ago | parent

>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?

KaiserPro 5 minutes ago | parent

lets run the flow diagram to find out:

1) are you rich?

2) are you useful to the present american government?

3) are you doing something that if stopped would break the AI buisness model

if you answered yes to more than one, you are not liable.

kelseyfrog 3 minutes ago | parent

How rich are you? Above a certain threshold crimes become whoopsies.

totallygeeky 10 minutes ago | parent

Ah, the continued pursuit of normalizing surveillance/becoming wholly reliant on a single service by making it cute with big eyes. Very tired of this already.

simianwords 10 minutes ago | parent

I hear that Dots don't count towards usage, is that true?

robofanatic 10 minutes ago | parent

Is this the Jony Ive project?

ceuk 9 minutes ago | parent

Incredibly advanced technology but I bet it still won't let me integrate with more than one Gmail account at the same time..

kirykl 9 minutes ago | parent

Seems like a solution in search of a problem

creposukre 8 minutes ago | parent

I can imagine Dots dating other Dots on behalf of their respective users in the near future, à la Black Mirror

zaxioms 7 minutes ago | parent

The way that this is marketed at children is nothing short of evil.

johnfahey 7 minutes ago | parent

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.

[1] https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2104823812042940713

terhechte 6 minutes ago | parent

> Dots are rolling out in ChatGPT on web, mobile, and desktop starting today to Pro users in markets excluding the European Economic Area, Switzerland, and the UK

Living in the EU, I suspected as much. Still sad. I understand it is because we voted in a bunch of imbeciles, still sad though.