Chris's post on X, curated on eChai

OpenAI DevDay 2026

Dots

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Sam Altman introducing dots on stage, cut by Chris, who reports on AI, with a summary of what OpenAI says dots do. The film runs a little over two minutes and plays where it was posted.

Chris 30 Sep 2026

Sam Altman introducing Dots:

“You can delegate ambitious pieces of work the way you would to a high-agency engineer or a chief of staff that you work with.”

OpenAI says Dots are designed to take on persistent responsibilities, keep working in the background, and return with completed work rather than waiting for another prompt.

Dots will reportedly have their own cloud computer and browser, inherit your connected apps and permissions, and eventually communicate outside ChatGPT through text and phone calls.

OpenAI also says users will later be able to work with entire teams of Dots at once!

For people who still don’t really understand Dots, it’s essentially an Astra-powered orchestrator running in the background and managing all of your Codex threads for you.

If you’re on one of the $100–$500 plans, Dots are effectively free for your first month and won’t count against your normal eligible usage allowances during that period. Dots can still spin up Codex tasks, though, and OpenAI hasn’t clearly spelled out yet whether those downstream Codex tasks are metered separately.

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The verdict

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Token Gremlin at the end of the day, on the gap between what OpenAI built up and what many people were waiting for.

Token Gremlin 5h

I’ve been getting dozens of DMs from people saying how disappointed they were with DevDay, and I think the reason is pretty clear. OpenAI built an enormous amount of hype around this event, so a lot of users went in expecting some kind of “miracle.”

Many were specifically waiting for a direct answer to Opus 5.5 in raw performance. Instead, OpenAI’s answer was much more about speed, efficiency, and cost.

To be fair, a smaller group absolutely loved that approach. GPT-6.1 Sol being much cheaper while getting close to Astra-level capability is genuinely impressive. But for a lot of people, that wasn’t the thing they were waiting for.

Then there’s the usage limits. The announced reductions hit people hard, especially because many users already felt constrained before DevDay. Cutting limits during an event that was supposed to make people excited was always going to leave a bad taste.

And I think Plus users are probably the most frustrated group right now. They were hoping for something meaningful in ChatGPT itself, but GPT-6.1 Sol launched in Work and Codex only. So once again, the obvious question is: "Where is Chat mode?"

I don’t think DevDay was a bad event. There were genuinely impressive launches here. But I do think there’s a very real gap between what OpenAI hyped, what users expected, and what many of them actually received. That’s worth listening to.

@thsottiaux @ajambrosino @JustinBleuel @victornunez @OpenAI @ChatGPT
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From the floor

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OpenAI's developer account on the 48 hours of side quests that followed the keynote.

OpenAI Developers 6h

Ready for a DevDay side quest?

10 builder challenges.
5 Codex Micros up for grabs.

Complete any 5 side quests to earn 1 raffle ticket for each.

48 hours. Join from anywhere 🌎
Dots

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Max Weinbach, an analyst at Creative Strategies, who could not make it to DevDay and had a dot handle the cancellations instead.

Max Weinbach 6h

This is kind of cool with dots

I got a little bit sick in Hawaii and after an 8 1/2 hour delay last Monday, the idea of flying to San Francisco for Dev Day was simply not happening (I appreciate the invite OpenAI, it was just too much all like 5 days before)

But I had dots go cancel my non-refundable hotel and flight and try to get me a refund. It emailed the hotel, who didn’t respond. After 2 days it decided to email the general manager of the hotel and request it, then got the GM to approve the cancellation with no fee. It noticed there was a $210 charge on my card after the GM agreed, so it followed up to ask why for me.

It also submitted a request with Delta for me, citing the 8.5 hour delay and saying the idea of getting on a plane after that was brutal and requesting an exception. I got a call an hour ago from support saying they’ll approve the request and do a full refund.

Couldn’t make it to Dev Day, but it still got me a full refund on 2 non-refundable bookings.

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