OpenAI’s dots agents strain compute as Musk calls Grok Bot costs unsustainable

The AI industry's pivot to proactive personal agents is running into a hard limit: the machines needed to run them The AI industry has decided that the next big thing is an assistant that does your chores rather than just talking about them. The problem is that these assistants are proving very expensive to keep running. This week, Elon Musk said the cost of serving Grok Bot, the personal AI assistant SpaceX introduced in August, has become a problem. Meanwhile, OpenAI’s new agents, called dots, are running into heavy compute demands of their own. Agents that act, and the bills that follow OpenAI unveiled dots on September 29, 2026, at its DevDay event. Each agent gets its own dedicated cloud Linux computer and runs on the GPT-6 Astra model. On November 3, 2026, OpenAI pushed an update that added the GPT-6.1 Terra model to the lineup. The numbers are not small. OpenAI’s agent activity costs more than half a million dollars per day and runs across thousands of GPUs in the company’s infrastructure. Reliability is also a work in progress. In OpenAI’s own internal testing of multiple task chains, dots committed scope violations 8.6% of the time. A scope violation means the agent wander...