OpenAI held DevDay yesterday and announced more than 20 new features and products, including GPT-6.1 Sol: a new model at one-fifth the standard input and output token prices of GPT-6 Astra. OpenAI says its Ultrafast tier for GPT-6 Astra delivers up to 300 tokens per second in Codex. This is the kind of iteration we have come to expect about every month or so. It’s not the story.
The most interesting part of DevDay was OpenAI’s focus on harnessing up the ecosystem and the tooling they are providing to help developers do business on OpenAI’s platform. “Sign in with ChatGPT” lets Plus and Pro users spend their plan allowance on eligible AI requests inside 16 partner products, including Cognition’s Devin, Notion, and Vercel. (Separate partner fees may still apply.)
OpenAI Marketplace lets eligible enterprise customers apply part of their existing OpenAI spend commitments to approved software from 32 partners, including Salesforce, ServiceNow, Adobe, Harvey, and CrowdStrike. Customers contract with and pay partners directly; OpenAI reconciles those purchases against their commitments. This gives customers another reason to keep their AI budgets committed to OpenAI’s ecosystem.
OpenAI is running a version of the Microsoft playbook. Microsoft bundled Word, Excel, and PowerPoint into Office, and sold you a convenient suite of products. OpenAI is making a similar bet on purchasing convenience.
The company also announced Dots: always-on agents designed to take on ongoing responsibilities. (Dots join Microsoft Autopilot, formerly Scout, and Meta Muse in the market for always-on personal agents.) Dots are worth a deeper dive; I’ll do a personal agent essay this Sunday.
Other notable announcements include ChatGPT Space, a shared workspace for teams and agents, and Pages, a new document type built for collaboration, along with new tools for sharing work across teams.For Business and Enterprise customers, @ChatGPT in Slack and Microsoft Teams lets coworkers use it without their own ChatGPT license once their organization enables it. The Agents API now does computer use, and Bedrock Managed Agents runs OpenAI agents entirely inside AWS. You can learn more about the product announcements here.
Wondering how OpenAI will make money? Pro 500, a new top tier with an advertised 25 times the Plus usage allowance, costs $500/month. That’s actually not a bad deal if you are frustrated by existing user limits. Existing Pro 200 users should note that OpenAI is also lowering their allowances after a transition period while keeping the price at $200/month.
About Shelly Palmer
Shelly Palmer is the Professor of Advanced Media in Residence at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and CEO of The Palmer Group, a consulting practice that helps Fortune 500 companies with AI strategy, implementation and governance, as well as technology, media and marketing. Named one of LinkedIn’s Top Voices in Technology, he is a bestselling author, covers tech and business for Fox 5’s Good Day New York, is a regular commentator on CNN, and writes the popular daily business blog Think About This. Follow @shellypalmer or visit shellypalmer.com.