I Tested OpenAI's Dots vs. Meta's Muse. What You Need to Know. transcript

Today I'm going to be comparing OpenAI's Dots and Meta's Muse on things like their features, their functionality, and their feel. Also talk about pricing and where I think these apps are headed so you can use your time wisely. And of course, I don't want to waste any more of your time, so let's hop right in. Okay, so we have Meta's Muse, which quickly became the number one app in the Apple App Store. And then of course we have ChatGBT's Dots.

Now, my immediate reaction when I got in here and started playing around with dots is that it felt like a bit of a rushed project to try to catch up because they saw how Muse was taking over and they realized we have a better model and you know we already have a lot of people inside of our chat GBT ecosystem. Let's give them essentially what Muse is but in our ecosystem and it just feels super rushed. You can see even during dev day yesterday when they announced this, you know, new product, it literally failed. it, you know, she was trying to call it here and it just wasn't responding and it was taking forever and she ended up saying, you know, oh, I think Doy or whatever the name is is having a slow day and they ended up like just kind of pushing past it, but they like muted it on the live stream.

So, everyone that was there live in person saw the live demo. They both have the ability to name your little muse or your dots and you can customize it a little bit as you can see. Same exact thing here inside of the chat GBT or the Codeex desktop app where I'm able to access my dot right here. Now, the first thing that surprised me was I was expecting DOTs to be more of a Grockbot feeling app where we would have a bunch of different bots that we could create and we could have them talk to each other, but this is way more like Muse where it's kind of one thread or one agent that you're talking to that kind of helps with everything on a personal level.

So, we will look at the UI and we'll compare the differences and we'll talk about which one I like more. But first, let's just talk about some of the foundational stuff. So background work, these are both persistent cloud agents that can have schedules and you can have conversations with and they both have their own cloud computer. The model powering dots right now is GBD6 Astra and the model powering Muse is Muse Spark 1.3.

I'll talk a little bit more about the differences between those models later in the video. As far as the existing work setup, you already have a direct connection in Dots to Chadbt Work and Codeex if you have the desktop app and if you, you know, just allow access. As far as Muse, it has its own computer and tools, and they both have a really good connector ecosystem. So, kind of like the super simple single sign on, just connect with a button rather than having to do a bunch of API keys and things like that.

And because they both have their own computers, they still can run scripts and you still could connect to APIs that might not have a native connector quite yet. They can both create documents, presentations, interactive dashboards. They can create all of that and keep them in the ecosystem. As you can see here, if I go to my library inside of Muse, I can see these different artifacts, whether that be a document or whether it be more of a live dashboard web artifact.

And then inside of my dots, you can see that there's a bunch of ways that we can see the outputs here, whether those be markdown files or dashboards and other things, of course, especially because with dots, your memory will start with your chat GBT memory and then it will start to develop its own context and learn over time. So right away my dot was connected to all my chatbt memory and it was saying oh you know you run this business and you use nadn every day and you do this and I was like okay that's really old memory that's chat gbt memory let me plug you into my actual local files and my codeex memory so that you have more real-time data of what I'm actually doing and what are my priorities but what I really like about muse is in here for the average person let's say you're coming in here and you click on your muse mine is named Charlie in this case there's a little identity tab over here where we can see the soul file and the memory file so the memory file We can actually like edit things.

This is like facts and preferences and commitments like that. And then if we go back over here and we go to the soul, this is like Muse's persona. So, you know, if you have built a Hermes agent in the past or OpenClaw and you've kind of worked with these memory and soul files, you will be familiar. But even if you're not, it just makes it super easy and visual because you can just sort of see it from this interface. Whereas with DOTS, it's a little bit more abstract as far as how it's understanding memory and you don't have as much to do with sort of like the profile.

I don't know why that looks super pixelated right now, but overall I'd say like the Muse interface is just a better experience, especially if you're thinking of someone who's non-technical. By the way, guys, I've got this completely free SOP for you about getting your first a automation client. It's going to go over the exact steps that has been proven for hundreds of our AIS Plus members to get their first paid gigs.

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So, if you want to grab this, there's a link for it down in the description. Let's get back to the video. Now, here's another difference with communication. You can obviously do this stuff from your phone. You can use the Muse app or the ChatBt app to talk to your Dot or to your muse. With the dots, you can instantly integrate them into Slack, which is pretty cool. So, this was literally like a three-click setup where I added this app into my Slack.

So, now I could chat with my actual Dot right here, and it would go ahead and respond. If I open up the desktop app real quick, you can see in here that you can see that it's thinking. So, you see at the top it says thinking, there's a little light bulb, and then in my Slack, that's how it's going to respond. But then also inside of a channel, I could have it talk to me in here by inviting it to a channel. So, your team could actually message your dot, which I think is pretty cool.

And once again, you can respond in here and it will show in the app that it has received this message, that it's thinking, and that it's trying to reply inside of that thread. And as you can see now, it is thinking, and then it's going to shoot a message back into the thread right there. It said, "Hey, I'm here." So, that is pretty cool. But with Muse, what you can do is you have a bunch of different chats you can manage.

So, you got your main chat and then you can set up different side chats for different topics. And you also have a native WhatsApp connector, which is pretty cool. So on the app in Muse, this is view only. So what I would do is inside of my WhatsApp, whether I'm on my desktop or I'm on my phone. I can just say, "Hey, how are you today?" And this obviously is Charlie, my muse, responding in real time. And then in the Muse app, I would be able to see this interaction, but not respond in here.

So it's a separate thread as far as my main chat, my WhatsApp channel, and then these side chats. And then what else is very interesting is the ecosystem. So because DOTS is already integrated into codecs and tragt if you are already living heavily in codecs and tragt then dots probably makes more sense at least right away when you want to figure out what this feels like. But with Muse it has some of these you know like the meta ecosystem.

So Instagram, Facebook, Facebook Marketplace and it just feels a little bit more you know detached from like this coding stuff. Anyways that's just a very quick rundown. We're going to dive into some more stuff here. But overall, after playing with these each for about a day, this is how I feel. If I could just sum it up, dots fits your current work environment if you're using Codex and HBT. It can use local skills. It doesn't feel like you're kind of starting over explaining a lot of things like priorities and things like that.

And it offers a direct route into Codex and Slack. Whereas Muse is much easier to evaluate for free because you can get started on this for free. It's inexpensive paid entry, editable memory, WhatsApp access, strong meta integration. Overall, like if I wanted to have my parents or people that I know that aren't technical at all, I would probably recommend Muse. It just has a better experience. And when you talk about this actual pricing on the Muse free, you can get up to 100 million tokens a week and you can get started.

Like I haven't yet paid for Muse. And then you can get on subscriptions and you can increase your tokens. Whereas in Chad with Dots, you have to be on a paid subscription in order to actually get access to building your first DOT. Now, there's something out about right now they're not actually attributing your dot usage to your weekly subscription, but I think that's just to sort of build some I guess adoption inside and then they're definitely going to have that ding against your subscription.

Now, also right now we talked about how Muse is powered by Spark and Dots is powered by Astra. So, let's talk a little bit about these models. Here's some rough benchmarks. Astra is a little bit more intelligent, but when we think about like professional work and knowledge work, Spark doesn't do bad at all. So creating some of these documents and helping you with some of these routine tasks and figuring out how to unblock yourself, things like that.

Now, when it comes to building apps and software and automations, obviously Ash is going to be a bunch better with coding. It's going to be a lot better, but Muse is also going to be a little bit faster. So, I guess what I'm trying to say here is if I was building a bunch of little automations and scripts that I wanted to run and things like that and dashboards with with one of these tools, I'd probably choose Dots. But like I said, for general knowledge work and if I'm just using this kind of as an assistant to help me keep on track, manage emails, remind me of things, manage the team, I would probably be pretty comfortable using Spark.

So, let me just show you. I've said quite a few times that I think the interface of Muse and the experience of Muse is just better. Let me show you why. Inside of Muse, you obviously come in here and you create one thread. So, with Grockbot, it can be a little intimidating to people because there's the ability to keep creating more bots, but here you just create one bot. Now, what you see right here is you see today, you see things that have been worked on by date.

You also click on this next tab, which is approvals if there's anything for you to approve. So, super nice, easy interface to approve things if you've got a bunch of automations running. You have a schedule tab. So, you can see here are your reminders. You can see here are things that are running. You can even check in on the heartbeat that runs every 30 minutes. And the heartbeat will proactively look at your Google Docs and your email, and it will give you alerts about things.

And it will even give you reminders like, "Hey, use me. Set this up." you know, like it it just feels like it's more user friendly there. And then of course you have the identity of looking at things like your soul and memory. Now also you'll notice on the lefth hand side we can search. So we can search through a bunch of different chats to figure out, oh, I was talking about this with Muse. Where'd that go? You can also look at your different chats like I talked about.

You can manage them here, which I really liked because it's not as overwhelming as having to build a bunch of different bots. It's more like, oh, you can have a couple side chats if you have one very specific project that you want my help with. Otherwise, use the main chat and here's the channel that you've connected me to. And this is plural. So, what I'm assuming is they're going to start to add more. Probably Slack, probably Teams, Discord, things like that.

A lot of times I hear from people, okay, if I was to use AI, what would I even use it for? Well, Muse does a good job of like giving you ideas. You can set goals, which I think is really cool. Optimize my sleep, health goals, relationship goals, career goals, interest goals. You can come in here and look for ideas. It'll tell you what it should be thinking about and how you should be kicking off like these different automations and things like that, building artifacts.

It's really, really cool. And then if you go to the feed, you can see that you can actually customize what you want to see. You can see things about sleep because I've been talking about sleep. You can look at OpenAI. You can look at all these different things. And if you like this, you can discuss it and you can just shoot off a task to your muse to say, "Hey, can we dig into this a little bit more? Build me an artifact for this.

Let's chat about this." Whatever. You can also like things, which is going to change the algorithm to give you more things that are, you know, actually relevant to you in your feed. I think this is a really cool experience. And then if I go to my artifacts, you can see that I have, you know, all of these here, documents or web. We can also create images. We can create videos. And then you can create podcasts, which I think is really cool.

So maybe you want to turn your feed daily tech news into a morning podcast, a three-minute morning podcast or you want a weekly podcast on what your team accomplished this week or how your workouts were this week. This is very, very cool. And something that I think like average people getting into this whole AI stuff, they'll think that this stuff is much cooler. Then if we go into dots, the interface just is not good.

It feels rushed. It feels very simple. Um the one thing I think that it has nice which Muse doesn't have is that you can call it. So you can call your dot, which is actually the thing that I showed earlier, which failed during the actual dev day launch. But you can call it, you can talk to it, it will respond in real time. It's pretty good voice. It's it's pretty like the latency isn't bad at all. They both have their own computers as you can see and it this saves login.

So very similar to Grockbot where you can save login. You can look at the actual sort of like terminal and you can also create and save files in here as well. This is how you set up that Slack connection. And then you can also review recent activity. It's not very easy to manage your scheduled tasks inside of Dots. As you can see, here's one, right? Plan tomorrow. And this is a repeat daily task at 8 p.m. Central. We have some advanced settings as well.

But I was asking Dots. I was like, how do I actually manage this stuff? and it was like, "Oh, click on my profile and go to scheduled." There's no scheduled in here. I guess the way you do it is you go to your scheduled tasks as if you were looking at like your codec scheduled tasks or your chatbt work scheduled tasks and you can see them in here. But why would you not be able to manage your scheduled tasks inside of the dots interface?

I thought that was just a little bit bizarre. And it also was telling me that it was really good at managing my codeex threads, which was cool, but it really doesn't do it. Here you can see I was like, "Oh, okay. So, you're kicking off new threads and it's just appearing in my recents. It's not actually putting it inside my Herk 2. So, I obviously like to manage my threads right in here in my Herk 2 project, but it would kick them off down here.

So, right here, you can see here's a thread that it kicked off. Actually, no, not that one. This one. You can see that it was sent by Herk. So, my DOT is basically kicking off these tasks, but it's not putting them inside of my Herk 2 project. So, I'm like losing the organization. So, that's leading me to this point, which is like DOT doesn't even know how it works. I love when I can talk to Claude Code or Codeex or Grockbot about how it works so I can get a better understanding of how I should utilize it, but dots will just tell me things that's like, okay, that's not actually how you work.

So, how do I, you know, just I start to lose trust over what kind of knowledge it actually has. But hey, at least this little guy is cute and customizable because ultimately people seem to care way more about that. Okay, so ultimately, where do we sit now? Well, I think that I'm going to continue to play around with both of them, but if I had to choose one for me, I would be choosing Codeex. I would be choosing Dots simply because I live inside of Codeex and Cloud Code.

I don't care as much about this super polished and super nice interface because I already have ideas and I already have goals set and I already have a lot of the stuff set up already. But if I didn't, I would 100% want this because Muse's interface is so much better. Their advantage there is meaningful. But what I think is interesting is that DOTs or OpenAI is probably getting so much feedback around Dots and they've obviously been looking at Muse and taking inspiration from it, which is why I'm so confused.

I was expecting Dots to come out and have a very similar style interface, but it's just like lacking so much. But what they're going to do probably is they're going to go to Muse and be like, "Okay, cool. I like this, you know, ideas tab. Let's put that inside of dots. I like the way that these artifacts are set up." And you know, Open II also did announce their spaces thing, which is going to be cool, but they're just going to take features of what people really like about Muse or what people really like about Grockbot and just put it in there as well.

So, what I think is going to happen is like Muse, Grockbot, Dots, they're probably going to all sort of blend into one sort of tool, meaning they're all going to look functionally very, very similar. The differences will be some of the native connections and the capabilities of integrating with what you already have and obviously the underlying model that powers the thing and then pricing you know like the cheaper ones might be perceived as better to certain audiences.

And that was kind of my next point which is I think Astra is just obviously a much better model than Muse Spark. So that is one advantage that it has right now. I also think that Grockbot right now is a different organizing model because it has a bunch of Grock bots that you use together rather than just kind of working with one thread. And I think that there's pros and cons to each. I think that the average user who is not deep into the world of AI will probably like the interface of Muse and Dots more because it just seems more simple.

Oh, I have one personal assistant that I can talk to and delegate work to rather than trying to figure out how many bots I should make inside of Crockbot. And then finally, just a little bit of disappointment here that dots feels so rushed. I mean, I was really excited when I heard that OpenAI was working on their own sort of always on agents. I thought it was going to be like Crockbot. I thought that it was going to be really really crisp and slick, but it just feels very buggy.

I actually tweeted this last night and I said dots should have been called bugs because I was having so many issues. I was going to make a video yesterday, but I was just getting so frustrated because nothing was working and I was like I couldn't get it on my phone and my desktop app wasn't working and I was just a little frustrated. It felt very buggy and it still does but it does feel better today. But it's just interesting how limited dots feels at the moment, especially when you had a very clear example like Muse to pull from.

So anyways, like I talked about earlier, I think it's really about understanding what are the things that matter most to you. Are you already kind of ingrained in the chatbt codeex ecosystem or are you more ingrained in like Instagram and Facebook and that kind of stuff might be more useful for you right now? Would you rather be able to talk to this thing on WhatsApp or would you rather be able to have this in Slack with your team?

I mean, I think the ability for my team to in Slack be able to talk to my essentially my codeex, I think that that's a pretty cool like functionality or for me to be able to assign my codeex things from Slack and have it be sent right back into Slack. I think that is super cool and I'd like to see that come to other apps as well. But that is going to do it for today. So, if you guys enjoyed, you learned something new, please give it a like.

It helps me out a ton. And as always, I appreciate you guys making it to the end of the video. I'll see you on the next one. Thanks everyone.