OpenAI Dot Vs. Meta Muse: How Do These AI Agents Compare?
Both agents can continue to work after you leave, but they differ significantly in pricing, permits, and where they can work.
Meta and OpenAI now have AI agents that are supposed to do more than just wait for the next prompt. Meta released Muse on September 8, followed by OpenAI’s new, still-active agents in ChatGPT three weeks later. Both can continue working after you leave, running their own cloud computers and connecting to external services.
The promise is tempting: give an AI a task and then stop checking it every five minutes. Muse can shop, fill out forms, plan a trip, send emails, and monitor things like prices. Dots can manage ongoing searches, work on connected applications, and perform recurring tasks, and OpenAI integrates them tightly with ChatGPT, Work, and Codex.
Dots and Muse can perform similar tasks, but the experience is different
OpenAI
Muse runs on a dedicated secure virtual machine with its own browser and is designed to look a lot like sending a message to another person. It can be used through Muse apps, the web, or WhatsApp, then linked to services like email and your calendar when you’re ready to make it more powerful. As part of Woozad, Muse transformed saved Instagram and Facebook posts into curated collections of recipes and restaurants.
Dot lives in ChatGPT and is powered by GPT-6 Astra. Everyone has their own cloud computer, can use connected plugins, remembers relevant context and can continue working on scheduled or recurring tasks. Users can also grant a Dot access to their local computer to retrieve files or browse the Internet, and OpenAI plans to allow users to manage multiple Dots simultaneously.
This is where the science fiction aspect fades a bit, since these agents still need supervision. Meta states that Muse asks permission before taking sensitive actions like sending an email or making a purchase, and OpenAI uses permissions, custom rules and automatic review to manage what Dots can do, with both companies warning that their agents can make mistakes. Even browser access has limits: Amazon has already blocked Muse from making purchases on its site.
Muse is much cheaper to try, but privacy controls are important either way
Meta
The most obvious difference is the price. The free tier of Muse has a usage cap, and the Power and Maximum tiers are $20 and $100 per month, respectively. Currently, individual users must pay much higher subscription fees to use Dots, with the lowest available option being Pro 100 for $100 per month. A Business Premium seat costs $100 per user per month (billed annually) or $125 per user per month (billed monthly).
Of course, subscription is not the only thing. The more accounts you link, the more knowledgeable the agent becomes, but that can mean accessing your email, calendar, files, and browser sessions (something most people wouldn’t give up lightly). Meta states that conversations and data within its VM are not shared with its advertising systems and that users can choose not to have the interactions used to improve Meta’s AI models. Woozad found the template enhancement setting enabled by default, as well as a default permission option that only asks for certain actions.
OpenAI states that Dots personal plan activity can be used to improve its models, depending on the user’s ChatGPT setting, while Business and Enterprise data is not used for training by default. Proactive Dot search is read-only until a subsequent action passes its normal permission checks.
Availability is another complication. Dots are rolling out to eligible Pro users outside of the European Economic Area (EEA), Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, while Dots are available to Business Premium users in supported ChatGPT regions, and Enterprise access is still in beta. OpenAI states that use of Dot will not count against your usage limits unless Dot is running in ChatGPT Work or Codex. Muse is currently available in the United States and Canada.
