Following Meta's blockbuster release of its Muse AI agent earlier this month, OpenAI jumped into the personal agent market on Tuesday with Dots, setting the stage for what could be the next big battle in the artificial intelligence market.
At its annual DevDay developer conference, OpenAI described Dots as "always-on" agents designed to help users complete a range of tasks. Since the release of Muse three weeks ago, investors have rallied around Meta, sending the stock up 29% in September, on pace for its best month since 2013.
That level of enthusiasm underscores the power of personal agents and the promise that consumers and office workers will be able to use the technology to book travel, pay bills, respond to emails and perform many more tasks. But OpenAI's entry, arriving soon after the launch of Muse, serves as a reminder that the AI market includes a handful of large companies all converging around the same types of products with little ability to lock in users.
Google calls its Gemini Spark offering "your 24/7 personal AI agent" for help, and Apple is trying to step up its position in the AI battle with its redesigned Siri AI, which it describes as "a profoundly more capable and personal assistant."
"I think what we are watching is an inevitable evolution of the technology," said John Waldmann, CEO of HR tech startup Homebase and a user of various AI agent-related tools. "It's probably no surprise that it's all happening around the same time."
It's not just the big companies that see the opportunity.
AI assistant startup Instinct announced Monday that it raised $1 billion from venture firms including Sequoia at a $10 billion valuation. And another startup, Town, is reportedly looking at a $1 billion valuation.
Town CEO Jean-Denis Grèze told CNBC in a statement that OpenAI's debut of Dots, "continues to validate the category and the need for work assistants."
"It's been our focus at Town from the very beginning," Grèze said, adding that he welcomes the competition.
On Tuesday, all eyes were on OpenAI, as investors and AI enthusiasts anticipated what the ChatGPT creator would unveil in the wake of last week's Meta Connect developer conference. There, Meta announced forthcoming AI devices, including a pendant, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg called Muse the "centerpiece" of the company's AI strategy.
Taking the stage in San Francisco for DevDay, Altman called Dots "remarkably capable" and "built to handle really anything you can think of." Although developers could already use OpenAI's existing tools to manage scores of AI agents for various office tasks, Dots promises to be an easier way for workers to use powerful digital assistants to help with tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams.
More uplifting than AI safety
The rush of new agents hitting the market offers a more uplifting story for AI companies at a time when the leading labs are facing intensifying scrutiny due to emerging concerns that the most advanced models are at risk of spinning out of human control.
On Tuesday, as Altman was attending DevDay, his second-in-command, Greg Brockman, was in Washington for a lunch that President Donald Trump was hosting for top technology leaders. The topic was AI safety, and the event came more than two weeks after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei sent shock waves across the industry, writing an essay urging AI companies to slow the pace of frontier model development.
Nick Deveau, CEO of AI sales startup GrottoAI, is a fan of AI agent tools like Instinct and sees the vision as companies start building them for a wider audience.
"The interesting thing about all of these, which I think has become apparent really quickly and is evidenced by some of the valuations, is that people see this as the first successful proof point of true agentic work hitting consumers," Deveau said.
There's still the question of whether consumers will pay. Meta's Muse is free with a usage limit and can be purchased starting at $20 a month after that. OpenAI's Dots is only available starting at the $100 per month Pro plan and higher.
And even with Muse racking up millions of downloads across app stores, that doesn't mean people are actively using it or other AI agents, Waldmann said.
"People will try it, but is it really adding value?" Waldmann said. "Is it part of a daily habit?"
Thomas Randall, a research director at the Info-Tech Research Group, said in an email that "the race is on," as AI companies search to figure out how consumers want to use agents and what will keep them coming back.
"Once leading systems are broadly capable, the winner will likely be determined by which agent is the easiest to adopt, the most connected, and the hardest to leave," Randall said. "We'll see who's distribution will gather steam first."