If you just want a way to talk to Chatbots, you’re practically out of options – there are countless ways to chat with bots, and countless new ones every day. But this is not the whole story of how we will interact with larger language models. It won’t get any better.
Thomas Paul Mann, CEO and co-founder of App Raycast, has a big vision about what an AI app can do. Raycast is many things: it’s an app launcher, it’s a way to find 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. However, because it has so much access to your data and your device, Raycast can actually use these AI models to work on your behalf. Agent AI, baby! Only this time, with even more possibilities – for better and for worse.
on this issue of The VergecastThe first in our two-part series on how developers are using AI and integrating it into their products, Mann lays out his big and small ideas for AI at Raycast. In the same way that many companies are hoping to integrate their bots with browsers to access all of your history and preferences and Chrome-installed muscle memory, Raycast thinks it can accomplish something 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 app you have installed. Theoretically, it could even open the terminal and mess with it. (That last advice may not be appropriate in most cases.)
Of course, this integration and access raises big questions. It’s one thing for a chatbot to make mistakes in text chat; It’s just another way to turn a hallucinogenic, imperfect device loose on your computer. AI agents, by and large, don’t actually work, so why would they be more reliable when they’re working on local files, not the entire Internet? And even if all this stuff does eventually work, how should we use it? Mann has some answers, and some questions of his own.
If you want to learn more about everything discussed in this episode, here are some links to get you started:
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