OpenAI’s new agent is a shot at Meta — but can it compete with free?

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OpenAI and Meta’s cutesy AI agents are about to fight to the death.

OpenAI and Meta’s cutesy AI agents are about to fight to the death.

At OpenAI’s annual DevDay conference, the company pulled out all the stops to compete with its rivals — primarily Meta, whose Muse AI agent platform has seen early runaway success. CEO Sam Altman walked onstage to cheers and announced Dots, a “real-deal AI” agent powered by GPT-6 Astra, “inspired by the cool agents that we all watched in movies growing up.” Similar to Muse, Dots aims for disarming cuteness, taking the form of colorful, personalizable blobs with eyes.

OpenAI fired shots at Meta by demonstrating Dots’ ability to not just act as helpful assistants but build metaverse-esque virtual worlds. But in one key area, Dots strikingly fails to compete: price.

Muse’s main selling point is making AI agent access free and frictionless. The company offers a free dedicated virtual machine that houses both the agent and the user’s associated data. OpenAI’s Dots, by contrast, is restricted for now to users on its $20/month Pro plan and up. While anyone with a Meta account can get Muse, most of ChatGPT’s 1.2 billion users won’t be able to use Dots.

There’s an obvious reason for this: OpenAI likely can’t afford it. The AI lab is reportedly currently aiming to raise $30 billion in funding at a $1.4 trillion valuation, per Bloomberg, and it’s experienced 70 percent growth since the beginning of its third quarter — nearing $70 billion in annual recurring revenue, Axios reported. Yet despite its staggering financing, its funds aren’t limitless, particularly compared to a tech giant like Meta.

In the past year, some users have accused AI labs of passing costs on to customers amid an AI money squeeze. OpenAI in particular is burning through a lot of cash right now — it expects to spend $280 billion by 2030, per the FT — and compute is expensive, while it’s also facing pressure from investors to button up its bottom line ahead of going public.

“Dots are starting out as a premium product — it uses a lot of compute,” Altman said Tuesday during