OpenAI enterprise lead explains origins of always-on assistant 'dots'
At TechCrunch Disrupt, OpenAI's enterprise product lead Alexander Embiricos discussed the development of 'dots', the company's always-on AI personal assistant released at its developer day in late September. He noted a convergent evolution in the industry toward such assistants, with companies adopting mascot avatars for their AI models. The conversation also touched on how 'dots' originated from OpenAI's coding tools.
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TechCrunch AITim Fernholz
The always-on AI personal assistant, which keeps working in the background even when you aren’t asking it to, is this year’s answer to the question of how people will actually use deep learning models. The startup Instinct became an overnight sensation, and Meta put the full force of its marketing behind its assistant, Muse. OpenAI wasn’t going to be left out. The company released dots, its assistant offering, at its developer day in late September. Alexander Embiricos, who leads OpenAI’s enterprise product team, joined us at TechCrunch Disrupt this month to explain where the product came from—starting with the question of why so many companies seem to be turning to cutesy mascots as avatars for their trillion-parameter matrix multiplication machines. “There’s kind of this convergent evolution happening,” Embiricos said of the efforts to build AI assistants. “As we were working on the product, we realized if we could frame this as, it’s an entity and it’s a single conversation, not man
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