OpenAI made over 20 announcements at DevDay on September 29, and the list is long: always-on assistants it calls dots, a shared workspace for teams, apps that run inside ChatGPT, and a button that lets you spend your ChatGPT plan inside other companies’ tools. The keynote ran 53 minutes, and the new model got about one of them. A couple of years ago, that slot was the entire event. Everyone waited for the benchmark chart. This time GPT-6.1 Astra, the model people expected on stage, was delayed, and hardly anyone minded.
I think that tells you what OpenAI is really building.
Why the New Model Got One Minute of the DevDay Keynote
In the 1990s, you bought a PC by one number. Megahertz. The ads talked about it; the salespeople talked about it, and every new processor made the last one look like scrap. Are you familiar with the current clock speed of your laptop? Probably not.
You know whether it’s a Mac or a Windows machine because processors got fast enough to do nearly everything we ask of them, and the fight moved to the software, the files, and the ecosystem around the box. Switching sides costs so much that almost nobody does.
Clayton Christensen, the Harvard professor, described that mechanism in the early 2000s. When a product gets better than most customers need, they stop paying for extra performance, and the value moves somewhere else, into branding, marketing, or community. AI models are heading there. The gap between two frontier models is getting harder to feel for most people, and OpenAI’s own numbers show it. The new GPT-6.1 Sol nearly matches GPT-6 Astra on agentic coding, computer use, and professional work at one-fifth of Astra’s price, priced at $2 per million input tokens and $10 for output, against $10 and $50 for Astra.
The race itself has been tight. Astra put OpenAI back in front of Claude Fable for the first time in a long while, and then on September 22 it happened again: OpenAI shipped GPT-6 Sol and Luna while Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 5.5. When a rival catches you within days, the model alone stops keeping your users.
So put yourself in Sam Altman’s chair. 1.2 billion people use ChatGPT every week. How do you turn “I open ChatGPT when I have a question” into “I use it all day because it makes my life easier”? Someone who lives in ChatGPT all day is much harder to lose.
OpenAI Dots Explained: An Assistant That Never Sleeps
The first answer is to give the assistant a face. A chat window is boring. It waits for your question and doesn’t exist outside the tab. A small character that follows you around, with a name, an icon, and a personality, is more interesting, and more so when it’s a whole family you can assign roles, tasks, and goals.
That’s a dot. You name it, pick an icon, connect your apps, and it keeps working when you aren’t talking to it. If you’ve followed AI for a while, this rings a bell. OpenClaw and Hermes have done it for months, but installing them was a chore for anyone who doesn’t enjoy running a server. In February, OpenClaw’s creator Peter Steinberger joined OpenAI while OpenClaw moved to a foundation and stayed open source. A few months later, OpenAI ships its own version inside ChatGPT.
An assistant like that needs two things: a place to work and access to your tools. ChatGPT already had the tools. What it lacked was a computer. So each dot gets its own cloud computer and browser and connects to over 4,000 apps, and you reach it from ChatGPT, desktop, phone, Slack or Teams. The limits are real, though. You create a dot from desktop only, and it can’t phone you.
It also doesn’t wait to be asked. On setup, a dot goes through the topics you have open and tells you what to do next, unprompted. You can hand it long, boring jobs, like comparing dozens of sites for hours to find the lowest price. For sensitive actions such as buying, sharing information, or touching an account, you write the rules: it acts alone, checks with you first, then you hand it control.
The catch is the cost. A cloud computer running around the clock for every user is expensive, so dots can’t go to 1.2 billion people. The first dot comes with Pro and Business Premium. Business Premium costs $100 and works in Europe. Pro doesn’t: Pro dots skip the EEA, Switzerland, and the UK at launch. In Europe, Pro costs €229 and doesn’t even come with a dot. I’d guess regulation, the AI Act above all, though I haven’t seen OpenAI say so outright.
OpenAI isn’t alone here. SpaceXAI has Grok Bot, and Meta has Muse, which opened to US adults on September 8 through WhatsApp, with a free tier and $20 and $100 paid plans. Muse leans toward life admin, since it lives where you already talk to friends.
Three companies, one dream: a personal assistant that knows everything about you and follows you around.
He Invented a Core Technology Behind ChatGPT. Now He’s Betting $1 Billion It’s a Dead End.
There’s a particular credibility that only comes from being wrong in public and then being vindicated by history. Yann LeCun has earned it twice.
But even the most capable assistant may not be enough to keep you. OpenAI needs something else.
ChatGPT Space and Plugins Pull the Whole Workday Inside
OpenAI has tried to hold you back before. Plugins, custom GPTs. Neither worked well. You were still juggling two windows, ChatGPT on one side and Excel or Google Slides on the other. Another effort is underway, and I think it will work because the priority has changed from individuals to team-based work.
The more people collaborate inside ChatGPT, the more reasons there are to stay when a better model appears elsewhere. You can swap a model in one click. A complete team working in one place won’t move for a few benchmark points. Over time, it stops being a model choice and becomes an ecosystem choice: your company is on Claude, or on Gemini, or on ChatGPT. And it won’t be you who decides.
So plan one is to copy what Google and Microsoft already do in the office. The second brick is ChatGPT Space, a shared workspace where you, your colleagues, and your dots work together on Pages and documents that humans and agents both write. It’s aimed squarely at Notion, Google, and Microsoft. You can tag a dot in a comment, and it gets to work, or give it a standing order: read this document every day, update the Slack channel, send me a report. There was a time when spending four hours building a perfect database made sense. Today an agent builds one in seconds, pulling information from everywhere.
Plan two is a soft transition, which is why plugins are back. The idea was good, and the ecosystem wasn’t ready. Now Codex is no longer a chatbot but real productivity software. It runs tasks remotely in the cloud, meaning you can initiate a task, close your laptop, and the work carries on; its terminal version also supports voice commands. OpenAI says over 35 million people use Work and Codex every week.
Apps can now appear inside ChatGPT, in the sidebar beside your conversations. Canva, Figma, and Adobe were named as early examples. It reminds me of the early App Store, when the first apps grabbed a big share of the traffic, and I expect developers to rush in far faster than two years ago. One old problem got fixed too. ChatGPT often failed to find the right tool at the right moment, even when you named it.
My guess is they copied how Claude does it, which worked much better.
ChatGPT now supports Chrome extensions; some users might use it as their browser. If publishers play along, you could generate videos, design in Canva, or manage tasks in your to-do app without leaving. My bet, and you can come back here if I’m right: the next step is a built-in team messenger, a Slack inside ChatGPT.
All of that works on professionals. The public mostly shrugs. Dots are out of reach in Europe, and everywhere else they start at $100. For consumers, OpenAI needs a different hook.
Sign in with ChatGPT Turns Your Plan Into a Data Plan
Remember the first phones with the internet? Every connection was billed, and you were nervous about pressing the wrong button. Then data plans arrived with gigabytes included, and we stopped thinking about it.
One subscription, every app, and none of them billing you for the connection. Your phone plan pays. That’s what OpenAI is doing with Sign in with ChatGPT.
First, there’s the button you know from Google, Apple, or Facebook, available everywhere. The trick is that Plus and Pro subscribers can also spend their plan’s usage inside partner tools, 16 of them at launch, including Notion, Vercel, and Devin. You cap each app’s weekly usage, and as I understand it, when the cap hits, it stops rather than billing you more. OpenAI says the apps don’t get access to your conversations or memories.
So OpenAI becomes your phone operator. Your plan, your AI gigabytes, spent wherever you like. You might say it’s like a bank account specifically for AI. And here’s the sly part. The operator sits in the middle, which means it sees which tools you use, how often, and how many tokens each one burns. Whether it will be used is unknown, but it’s a useful seat to hold.
There’s a second idea. Claude hasn’t been the most open on this. Anthropic took a long time to accept subscription usage inside other apps, and it’s still a gray area. OpenAI positions itself as the universal connector, the USB-C of AI, so one subscription works in every tool you use. Nobody wants to buy little bundles of credits in five different places.
And the one model OpenAI showed, GPT-6.1 Sol, nearly matches Astra at a fifth of the price and is pitched as the everyday model. It isn’t in regular ChatGPT chat yet. It lives in Work, Codex, the API, and Amazon Bedrock. Either way, the model you use becomes secondary.
The ecosystem you pick matters.
The Lock-In Bet and the BlackBerry Risk
Put the pieces back together. Dots do the work. Space holds your documents and your coworkers. Your account follows you into every tool. Where is that heading? ChatGPT is becoming an operating system, with ChatGPT in the middle.
The plan rests on a bet that only holds if models stay neck and neck. BlackBerry had everything: enterprise email, BBM, keyboards that professionals loved. The iPhone arrived in 2007 with something clearly better, and BlackBerry stopped designing its own phones in 2016. An ecosystem protects you from a slightly better rival, not from a much better one. If Anthropic or Google ships something from another stratosphere, the whole thing wobbles. OpenAI is betting that won’t happen, or won’t happen fast enough for you to leave.
And it pays off the day your documents, your meetings, and your assistant all live in ChatGPT. Leaving for Claude gets very hard, and a better model alone won’t convince you. In that choice, the model may weigh about what it weighed in the keynote.
One minute.
OpenAI’s $14B Loss and the Weaker $200 Plan
One last problem: ChatGPT will want its money back. OpenAI isn’t profitable, not even close. Its own internal projections put the 2026 loss at $14 billion, a figure that leaves out stock compensation; so the accounting number could run higher. And it keeps adding more compute.
Then, for the first time, a hint that doesn’t point in a good direction. Alongside the good news, OpenAI re-tiered ChatGPT: Plus at 1x, Pro 100 at 5x, Pro 200 at 10x, and a new $500 Pro at 25x. From October 30, the Pro 200 allowance for Codex and Work falls from 20x to 10x of Plus, and weekly GPT-6 Pro chat messages drop from 200 to 100. Existing subscribers keep their limits for a while and get a one-time credit. OpenAI claims the cut reflects “our increasingly efficient models,” while Reddit and the OpenAI forum were sceptical.
They may be right on the facts. Efficient models require less usage. But it may also be the first piece of evidence of how risky captivity can be for the captive. OpenAI’s ultimate bet is that models keep getting cheaper to run and that holding a large part of humanity captive lets it make a lot of money later. It’s why Sam Altman looks unbothered every time someone asks whether burning this much cash worries him.
I think it’s a powerful strategy. They’re sitting in real product-market fit: the market is ready, the tools are ready, and the ecosystem is ready to build the AI operating system of tomorrow, which is exactly why my advice is the boring one. Never get too much of a prisoner of any single ecosystem. Keep your files portable and keep a second assistant warm.
If ChatGPT already holds your documents, your meetings, and half your open tabs, tell me whether you could still walk away. Follow us and don’t forget to support us by subscribing to stay updated.