Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of cute little AI agents that are definitely not dots. They're like different shapes. I'm David Pierce. Yesterday, OpenAI hosted its annual Dev Day. It's its big annual conference where it shows what's on the frontier of what it's developing. This year, there's a lot of companies that are all rushing to make vaguely the same thing. And the biggest news this year was OpenAI's new dots. Dots are little agents that will go do things for you, but with one big quirk: they're really cute. I brought on senior AI reporter Hayden Field to talk about it. But first, here's what's happening on The Verge today.
I'm Travis Larchuk, and this is 90 seconds on The Verge for Wednesday, September 30th, 2026. We didn't see any smart home stuff at Apple's September event, but according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, we're about to on October 13th. He says that's when Apple will debut its long-rumored smart home hub, which will maybe be called the HomePad or something else. Who knows? We should also expect a new HomePod mini and an upgraded Apple TV. According to Gurman, Apple Home users have been waiting on these updates for literally years. So, what's another Fortnite to wait? Next up, Instagram announced a new AI creative assistant that will give you feedback on your posts and suggestions on how to increase engagement. YouTube announced a similar feature recently, and I know that this feels icky to some people, but personally, I'm interested. If you make content for social media, you know that sometimes it's really hard to figure out why one thing hit and another thing didn't. It feels arbitrary a lot of the time. And so a tool that can give you suggestions that are data-based rather than vibes-based actually feels useful to me. And finally, the most important news of the day. The Verge's Nathan Edwards reports that dads in his Texas neighborhood are sending each other single potatoes by drone. They're ordering them from Walmart using Wing drone delivery. The dads reportedly discovered that they can have the potatoes delivered to anyone's yard, not just their own yards. And the best part is that each potato delivery only costs 82 cents total. At that price, you can't afford not to send your neighbor a potato. You can read more at theverge.com. That's 90 seconds on The Verge for Wednesday, September 30th, 2026.
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Hayden, thanks for joining us.
Thanks for having me all the way from SF.
Oh yeah. So, you just got out of the developer conference. This just happened, right? Number one thing that the company announced was this AI dots feature. Can you explain exactly what OpenAI chatbot dots is? What is the official name for this exactly?
So OpenAI's dots is basically the company's answer to Meta's Muse and OpenClaw. It's the long-anticipated continuously running AI agent from OpenAI, the consumer-facing one. You know, this is something that we wrote a couple of days ago that OpenAI really needed to catch up on. It was one of the areas that everyone was looking at the company saying, 'Okay, well, where is theirs? It's strange that they're behind on this.' That was kind of the consensus that Meta had suddenly pulled ahead and it was unexpected and that, you know, OpenAI was working on something rumored to be almost the same. Now they've announced it and also they made it really cute. Similar to Meta's Muse, they're basically cutesy little blobs with eyes and you can customize them however you want. So I think that's part of how OpenAI is banking on people, you know, feeling maybe better about using these agents. Same with all the other companies. It's like make them cute, make them customizable, and you know, they're hoping people will be okay with giving them a lot of data.
So, OpenAI. Yeah. I mean, like, you know, one of the ones that they demoed was named Alfred, and it's, you know, you can name it whatever you want. And then, you know, it immediately transformed into like a butler-looking blob with like, you know, glasses and a mustache. I think they had a lot of different little blobs on display. But yeah, I think, you know, there's a lot of customizable options. You can change the color. You can change like the eyewear, hat maybe. So, there and the name. So, I think they're really, you know, hoping that people kind of go ham on the personalization here.
The most interesting part of it though to me is that although this is directly, you know, aimed at, you know, kind of gaining users away from Meta's Muse, it's only rolling out to paid users, Pro and Business users. So, it's not free for everyone like Muse is. And so I think that's kind of an interesting hallmark here. The fact that, you know, OpenAI desperately wants to compete with Meta on this but they can't afford to fully because it's such a compute-intensive product.
Yeah. Besides having an embodiment of this agent, the primary question that I have is how exactly is this different from just a regular ChatGPT chat that can do things for you? You know, if you're using Claude, it can go control your computer. What is it about these agents that are uniquely different from just using the regular service?
Essentially, there's a couple different ways. They can go off and do things for you in the background continuously even without you having the window open, you know. So, that's a big selling point for people. You know, they don't have to, you know, keep their computer open and stay awake or whatever. They can just go off and live their life and the agent is doing stuff in the background. Another part of it is that, of course, you know, you're supposed to be able to text with them, maybe phone call with them, talk to them in a way that, you know, is really accessible for people beyond just like a ChatGPT chat window. However, OpenAI was even behind in that because they said the texting and calling function will be coming soon, not right now, you know. So, that's a lot of this is I think frontloading something so that they have a horse in the race, but you know, there are a couple features that they haven't yet rolled out.
So, OpenAI noted that they have over 4,000 integrations for these dots. For people that don't know, what is an integration?
Yeah, basically an integration is like the way that these agents are useful at all because you know you could use an agent in a vacuum but okay that's not that helpful. The way that they become useful is using them for your life and with the other tools that you use. Like think about if you had a personal assistant and then they didn't have any of your logins. You know, I was a personal assistant back in the day and I needed my boss's SkyMiles number. I needed her calendar access. I needed her like email login, basically everything for her whole life. So same thing with these agents, you know, integrating with different platforms you use, different tools, different accounts. And yeah, with OpenAI it's interesting because they don't naturally have a bunch of this stuff in-house. So their integrations may work a little worse with certain products than, you know, say Google's AI agent is going to have better integrations with Google products. Meta's AI agent is going to have better integrations with Meta products. So, you know, OpenAI is really gunning for the quantity, you know, of integrations maybe over some of the quality because they don't have anything in-house, but they're like, well, you know, we can connect to everything. It's just it's going to be they basically are saying it's going to be good, but it might not be as good as some of these other companies' in-house AI agents, right?
I also heard something about these specialist dots that they're announcing. Can you explain what those are?
They're launching these specialist AI agents that are aimed at being really good at certain niche enterprise functions. So, you know, one for legal, one for marketing, one for accounting, things like that. And they launched with a bunch of partners to start like Harvey, Lora, a bunch of different companies, you know, that are in these different fields. So, it'll be interesting to see how those play out. I don't know if they're live yet, but they will be soon. And so, yeah, they're supposed to be, you know, agents that are just, you know, really good in a certain field. And, you know, they can kind of be a co-worker in that sense where, you know, they're senior and they've been in the field for a long time is kind of the way they're positioning it, right?
Because Muse is sort of around for listing things for you on Facebook Marketplace, which, you know, we've had some problems with so far already. It's supposed to do things for you in your personal life. A lot of people use ChatGPT and a lot of people probably have Pro. People that have Pro are, you know, it's $20 a month and they can access these dots. Do you think that they're going to see a lot of interesting use cases from this or do you think that it's primarily targeted at work?
