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OpenAI dots inspire open source imitators amid technical difficulties
When OpenAI introduced dots last month, it pitched them as "always-on agents" running in their own cloud computer, but that may be overstating the readiness of the technology and of the people trying to use it.
3 min read
Key points
- When OpenAI introduced dots last month, it pitched them as "always-on agents" running in their own cloud computer, but that may be overstating the readiness of the technology and of the people trying to use it.
- "OpenDots is completely open source and gives you the same thing [as OpenAI Dots] as a template you host yourself," the biz said in a post last week.
- "Open Dot is an open source version [of OpenAI Dots] that runs on your own Mac with your own OpenAI key, or with open models like Kimi, DeepSeek and Qwen through OpenRouter," the project repo explains.
The story
When OpenAI introduced dots last month, it pitched them as "always-on agents" running in their own cloud computer, but that may be overstating the readiness of the technology and of the people trying to use it. Presently, multiple users are reporting task failures and connection issues with their dots. Others have flagged cloud connectivity problems, dots that disappear, and dot refusals that appear to be related to abuse prevention. And the OpenAI Developer Community forum shows several similar concerns. OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment about the usage of dots. ABI Research argues that "AI claws" – always-on agents – will shape enterprise AI adoption. The biz sees "a market evolving from isolated assistants toward modular agent ecosystems built for longer-running, enterprise-grade automation." Despite the hiccups that have afflicted dots, some skepticism on social media forums, speculation that OpenAI rushed dots out in response to Meta Muse and Grok Bot, and security issues, dots have some enthusiastic users in addition to detractors who just don't see the point. They also have competition from companies and developers who believe they can deliver a similar service more affordably, with fewer restrictions. A company called Tawkit that makes an SDK called CopilotKit has released OpenDots. "OpenDots is completely open source and gives you the same thing [as OpenAI Dots] as a template you host yourself," the biz said in a post last week. "Bring any agent through AG-UI, use any OpenAI-compatible model, and make every part of it your own." The company previously released OpenMuse and OpenBot. These projects essentially separate the user interface, the AG-UI agent layer, and the backend to provide an alternative personal agent. This doesn't eliminate the token expense of whatever agent is deployed, but it does mean that OpenAI may not be doing the billing. Then there's a potentially lower cost option, called (confusingly) Open Dot, powered by AI models running on OpenRouter. And as it's open source, the code could be altered to run using a local model – a feature that we understand is planned. "Open Dot is an open source version [of OpenAI Dots] that runs on your own Mac with your own OpenAI key, or with open models like Kimi, DeepSeek and Qwen through OpenRouter," the project repo explains. It allows users to connect to various apps like Gmail, Calendar, Slack, Notion, and GitHub via Composio. Prathit Joshi, the project's creator, told The Register, "I enjoy building and shipping tools for developers, especially tools that can support use cases that closed model companies aren't necessarily incentivized to support, like allowing open source models." Joshi is based in Bangalore, India, and works as a growth engineer at Composio. He said he's been using Open Dot to handle personal tasks like setting "to do" lists for the day based on Slack messages and summarizing posts on social media. Open Dot is based on the Electron framework, Joshi said, because he wanted it to be a desktop app. Distinguishing between OpenAI dots, OpenDots, and Open Dot may be confusing, but don't expect things to get any better in the near future. Everyone is busy wrapping increasingly commoditized models in a gatekeeping layer, in the hope of developing a sustainable business. For example, Elon Musk said on Tuesday that Grok Bot would become a model router rather than a front-end for a specific model. "Going forward, SpaceX will use the best back end model for any given task, including Claude Opus 5.5, MidJourney, Suno and other leading APIs," he said. "Whatever is most likely to give you the best outcome." ®
