How AI models can change the way you use your computer

If all you want is a way to talk to ChatGPT, then you’re spoiled for choice – there are countless ways to chat with bots, and it seems there are countless new ones every day. But this is not the whole story of how we interact with large linguistic models. It’s better not to be.

Thomas Paul Mann, CEO and co-founder of the app Raycasthas a much greater vision of what an AI application can do. Raycast is many things: it’s an application launcher, it’s a way to search and interact with files on your computer, it’s a note-taking app, and yes, it’s another way to talk to ChatGPT and other LLMs. Because it has so much access to your data and device, Raycast can use these AI models to do things for you. AI agent, dear! Only this time, with greater potential – for better and for worse.

on This episode of vertcastpart one in our two-part series on how developers use and integrate AI into their products, Mann explains his big and small ideas for AI in Raycast. In the same way that many companies hope to integrate their bots with browsers, in order to access all your history, preferences, and muscle memory built into Chrome, Raycast believes it can achieve something very similar by replacing your Mac’s Spotlight and your PC’s Start menu. It can help you create, manage, and organize files, but it can also work inside any application you have installed. It could, in theory, even open up the terminal and run wild with it. (This last option may not be advisable in most cases.)

There are, of course, huge questions raised by all this integration and access. One of the things that a chatbot can make is errors in text chat; Launching a hallucinogenic and incomplete tool on your computer is quite another. AI agents, in general, don’t really work, so why are they more reliable when they work on local files rather than the entire Internet? And even if all of these things eventually work, how are we supposed to use them? Mann has some answers and some questions of his own.

If you want to learn more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started: