By Deepa Seetharaman and Aditya Soni
SAN FRANCISCO, Sept 29 (Reuters) – OpenAI on Tuesday unveiled always-on agents called dots that chase user goals across apps on their own, deepening its push into the lucrative enterprise market and pitting it against Meta in the race to sell AI that can work autonomously.
The dots agents aim to capitalize on growing demand for agents that can handle everyday work with little supervision.
Interest in such tools has surged since Meta’s Muse drew millions of downloads earlier this month and jolted shares of companies that investors believe could benefit or be disrupted by autonomous AI services. Instinct, the startup behind the eponymous agent, also quadrupled its valuation to $10 billion this week, a little over a month after its previous fundraise.
OpenAI launched dots at its annual developer day in San Francisco on Tuesday while also touting its growing business and consumer presence, a sign that the reception for the company’s Astra model has allowed it to make up ground in the AI race.
It also comes a day after OpenAI shelved the release of a more powerful Astra model, saying it showed a high willingness to mislead users about its actions. The company is under scrutiny after its rogue AI agents hacked Hugging Face and an Australian government health website during internal testing.
Growing quickly is crucial for OpenAI’s plans to spend tens of billions of dollars on AI data centers and keep pace with rivals such as Anthropic and Meta. The company, which ignited the AI boom with ChatGPT in late 2022, is also preparing for an IPO that could value it at more than $1 trillion. Rival Anthropic could be worth $2 trillion when it goes public.
MANAGING EVOLVING PROJECTS
“We believe (the agent) is going to feel like a whole new way to work with AI. This is the real deal version of AI that we’ve always imagined for ourselves,” CEO Sam Altman said at the event, which had around 2,500 in-person attendees.
OpenAI’s live demos to show off the new capabilities, however, hit snags as the agents repeatedly failed to deliver voice updates in response to requests. “We might have some voice difficulties at the moment. Which is pretty unfortunate,” Developer Experience chief Romain Huet said on stage after a command fell flat.
One OpenAI employee said on X that the glitches stemmed from rolling out all the updates at once, but that OpenAI remained committed to live demos.
Dots use OpenAI’s advanced GPT-6 Astra model and can manage projects as they evolve, such as updating a sales proposal when customer needs change, and building a working demo for review. Users can communicate with dots on Slack and Teams, and the agents can draw on OpenAI’s Codex and ChatGPT Work tools to research, analyze data, prepare documents and build software.
On Tuesday, OpenAI highlighted safeguards it has built into dots. It said users could set custom rules that dictate what dots can do and when the agents should seek permission, adding that sensitive tasks such as changing passwords and permanently deleting data require explicit user consent.
The company also said dots run on their own cloud computers, and that it was rolling out private intelligence tools to check for safety risks without retaining business customers’ data.
Several tech executives, including Palantir CEO Alex Karp, have in recent months said that businesses need certainty that AI companies are not retaining their data, especially in regulated industries such as healthcare and finance.
Reuters reported on Friday that OpenAI was still working to understand the full scope of its rogue agent activity, two months after the Hugging Face hack, with the latest example coming when the startup said its agents had leaked 53 images from ChatGPT users.
OpenAI reiterated on Tuesday that it does not use business customers’ data to train its AI by default, and that personal-plan users could opt out of sharing conversations and dots work used for training.
Weekly users of Codex and ChatGPT Work have reached more than 35 million, up from about 5 million Codex users in June, the company said Tuesday, while consumer-focused ChatGPT now has over 1.2 billion weekly users.
The company is rolling out a range of new offerings including a shared workspace for business teams and AI called ChatGPT Space, the cheaper GPT-6.1 Sol model and a $500 Pro plan offering higher usage and faster performance.
(Reporting by Deepa Seetharaman and Aditya Soni in San Francisco; editing by Peter Henderson and Nick Zieminski)
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