Even trillion-dollar companies aren’t immune to the occasional tech glitch — even when the world is watching.
OpenAI faced a couple of technical hiccups during its Dev Day event today. Its new Dot agent was unable to respond to an employee’s command, prompting her to first laugh awkardly, and then comment: “I guess Dot’s having a slow morning”.
But that wasn’t the only flub of the night. OpenAI’s voice mode didn’t work throughout the demo by Romain Huet, head of Developer Experience at OpenAI. After the voice commands didn’t work, he was forced to type in commands. Huet repeatedly said that the demo would’ve been more impressive had the voice commands worked.
The glitches led to some commentary online.
OpenAI’s livestream centered on Dots, a new line of always-on AI agents that work 24/7 and can be reached by text, phone call, email, or voice mode. Dots can buy things on a user’s behalf and delegate work to GPT-6 Astra, and, like Meta’s Muse, they have a cute look and can be given custom names. Inside the new ChatGPT Space, people and agents collaborate: Dots can be tagged and assigned tasks in group chats, and OpenAI says its own engineers use them to fix dozens of bugs a day. Dots and Space are available to Business Premium and Enterprise users without eating into usage limits, and Enterprise customers also get specialized Dots for accounting, email marketing, legal analysis, and ticket resolution.
Around that, OpenAI announced a wave of platform and pricing updates. GPT-6.1 Sol delivers near-Astra intelligence at a fifth of the price, and an “ultrafast” mode, 8x faster than standard at 300 tokens per second, is coming to the API, ChatGPT, and Codex. A new $500 Pro plan offers 25x Plus usage, no 5-hour limit, and use across partner apps. OpenAI also introduced Private Intelligence, with ZDR with Private Safety Processing and a preview of Private Inference, backed by partners including Databricks and Snowflake. Finally, with 1.2 billion weekly users, OpenAI is expanding ChatGPT into a platform through Sign in with ChatGPT (16 launch partners), plugin extensions for tools like Adobe and Figma, a plugin library with recommendations, and an OpenAI Marketplace with more than 30 launch partners.