Dot protects Altman’s mornings and helps him build

Transcript

From the transcript AI & I publishes with the episode.

1. 8:59

   The Dots, the new thing we launched today, is the first thing that has given me back control of my mornings and my mental space in the mornings. I used to love the early mornings. It's my favorite time of the day to work. It's like maximum creativity. That's when I would do the really deep, complicated project of the day. And then now I run this big company and something is going wrong all the time.

2. 9:20

   And overnight, a lot of stuff happens. And if I don't check my phone right away, then... you know, sometimes it was fine. And sometimes there was like a real disaster that if I ignored for an hour, just got much worse. The problem had been that as I checked my phone, I polluted my brain with all these other things and I lost the deep work period. But now I trust my dot to go have good judgment about what I need to think about, not think about if there's something very urgent, otherwise handle things for me.

3. 9:47

   And I get this space for kind of like creativity or to just hang out with my kids back. And that has been like, you know, it sounds small, but like a significant improvement to my life. That's what I was going to ask is so it look, it seems like it's deflecting a lot of things that you might have had to deal with immediately that you can just like leave for later because you're confident you get the thing you need when, when you check it in the moment.

4. 10:08

   Yeah. I mean, two, two things that happened today about that, um, during the The keynote, we had like a big seven production. This is the risk of live demos and trying to deploy many new features at once. I was recurring. So that happened. Tebow got a message from his dot five minutes before the demo saying, just to let you know, I see that you're in the Dev Day keynote. I know you were working on it.

5. 10:36

   I know what the demo is because I was able to look at the presentation in space or whatever. And this set is probably going to make the demo not work. would you like me to try to fix it? There's like a few minutes to go. And now it couldn't fix it yet, but like maybe the next version will be able to go fix that in prod. And like, think about that whole, like all the stuff that had to come together to make that work.

6. 10:59

   Just right now, before I came here, I've been in like back-to-back stuff all day. very, very behind on all of my normal stuff. My dot, just before I had walked into the last thing said, you have one little break between now and this thing you're gonna go to with Dan, you have to pay attention to this one thing. I never would have found that otherwise. And like, it would have been a big mess. And just the fact that I don't have to worry about that feels super different.

7. 11:24

   What's your Dot's name? Dottie. I had Alfred earlier. And then many people are calling it Dottie for now. But I'm trying to think of a great name. Mine's name is Boo. That's a good one. What do you think so far? I know it's super early and still rough. I like it. It has become the default way that I use chat, which I think is a very promising thing. Me too. And I shared with you, I think I'm in the beta.

8. 11:49

   So I was in the early period. So I think it has limits. It has been a little bit buggy for me. There's a lot of different surfaces that it can be used on, like mobile and it has its own cloud computer and all that kind of stuff. And I think those kinds of things, getting that cleaned up is a big deal, but yeah. I think this is the kind of thing where it's going to get better rapidly each week from here, but it's going to definitely take some time to smooth it all up.

9. 12:13

   I had a similar example where I was trying to reschedule a flight, and it was like, hey, you have a meeting during this flight that you're rescheduling, but it wasn't on my calendar. It had just read it in Slack. Yeah. And then it was like, yeah. That thing about the ability to bring context together from across your entire life and really do things in ways that would be hard even for an attentive person to get right has been super impressive.

10. 12:36

    That's been one of the things I found most useful about it. What had to happen from a research perspective to make this possible? This is a very complicated system with a lot of stuff, but maybe most important was Astra. We needed a, you needed a smart enough model. And then there were a lot of other things you had to build too, but getting the model over the intelligence bar was a key part. You've told me that there's been a couple times, not just for scheduling or things that are urgent, like filtering, but there have been a couple times where it's helped you see something or make a decision with OpenAI that you could not have, you said you couldn't have hired someone to do that.

11. 13:12

    Like it'd just be too complicated. Do you have any specific examples you can share? There was one new feature that I was kind of excited about, and it would have been very hard to explain it, to people in enough detail to get it built. And even then there were like a lot of ways to do it and I wouldn't have been confident in which one. And I just like, I would just like constantly jot notes as I thought of something or as I was like on a walk or whatever to my dot.

12. 13:37

    And then the dot went off and built like five or six versions. I was able to give feedback. I was able to iterate. And it was just like whenever I had a spare moment or had an idea and the kind of like, the ability to just like dump that in raw form, the ability to like get and give pretty continuous feedback on it was very cool. And then, so there's like many categories like that where like, an idea that would be, you'd be so unsure about, or it would be too much effort for you or for someone else to build, you can actually just kind of like continually iterate on.

13. 14:08

    And it's like, it's pretty cool to go to sleep and like just leave a long voice note as you're kind of drifting off with a bunch of thoughts and like wake up in the morning, not only is the thing built, but it like went off and did like the next seven steps. It's the best. And it's like, all right, this is like a very cool way to express stuff. And then also, there's a set of tasks that I would normally give up on, or that I would have given up on before.

14. 14:32

    There was a thing that I was sure I had seen in Slack. And Slack search is obviously terrible, so I mostly use Codex to search it. And I had been searching for this thing, because I wanted to find it again. I wanted to reference it. And I spent a good 10 or 20 minutes trying to search with Codex and find this, and I kept trying different things. And didn't find it. And I was like, man, maybe I dreamed it and this didn't really happen because Codex doesn't usually fail.

15. 14:58

    And I kind of gave up on it. And then the next day, my dot was like, hey, I noticed you were trying to do this thing and you didn't find it. But I kept thinking about it overnight and I found it for you. And I was like, what? And it was a screenshot. I had forgotten in my head it was a screenshot, not text in Slack. And it just sat there very patiently looking for something to do to be helpful to me and looked at image-react every screenshot and found the thing.

16. 15:24

    And I was like, that's really... I would have given up on that. I think there's a... We're constantly feeling there's way too much to read in Slack, on email, and all that kind of stuff. And it's perfect for that amount of context to just get you the right thing at the right time. People have talked about the need to have an agent... deal with the just onslaught of the internet and all of the various things trying to like hack our attention and distract us and whatever.

17. 15:49

    And I have definitely learned in the few weeks that I've been using dots that although technology is very wonderful in many ways, the kind of like crazy attention hacking of social media and phones and notifications had gotten way worse than I realized for me personally.