Will ChatGPT Desktop Sherlock Raycast AI for Me?
Part of the Raycast series
Interesting things are afoot at the company known as OpenAI. Apparently they’re in the Sherlocking business now, and their target is (unintentionally?) Raycast AI. I’m talking about an AI chat triggered by keyboard shortcut, with model selection, conversation history, contextual awareness and screenshot and image analysis, and more.
Sadly, I don’t have access to it yet – OpenAI is rolling it out to people gradually, even for those of us who have ChatGPT Plus.
Matt Birchler has a video overview of it, and I’m only going to pick one nit with Matt – Matt, how’d you manage to get access to it just by signing up as a newbie to ChatGPT Plus, while loyal old me who’s been handing over money for ages still can’t get it?!
Oh well. Here’s his video.
ChatGPT just released a Mac app, here’s how it works - YouTube
My thoughts on this are that Raycast might feel some pain with respect to their $8/mo Advanced AI option at some point. It’s true that Raycast Advanced AI gives you access to several non-OpenAI models, but personally I never use them. Raycast has to keep changing their allowed token limits whenever OpenAI or one of the others makes changes, and sometimes it comes after customers asking why the token limits are still at the old limits instead of following what the AI model providers are currently doing for a given model.
The way I usually use AI in Raycast is absolutely as a replacement for other third party apps like MacGPT, FridayGPT, etc. I use the hotkey (^G in my case) to open the separate AI chat window, which then basically behaves like a separate app with its own sidebar, history of chats, copy and paste, etc, etc. I very rarely use Raycast Quick AI, which is basically typing something in the standard Raycast text input and then hitting tab instead of return to submit it to the LLM of choice. This means that, for me, the OpenAI ChatGPT desktop app could well replace the Raycast Chat app.
The benefit of most 3rd party apps over Raycast AI is that you bring your API key and get all the access you pay for already, whereas Raycast needs to provide their AI integration as a service and having people pay monthly for something they’re also paying for an API key for won’t work… except that’s what most of us using Raycast Advanced AI are probably already doing.
The official ChatGPT desktop app, on the other hand, doesn’t use an API key, but instead uses your ChatGPT Plus subscription. I do pay for this still, in addition to an API key. And while it’s true that the Raycast Advanced AI option costs less than ChatGPT Plus, and it’s also true that it pays for itself for me, it still doesn’t make sense to pay for overlapping services unless there’s a tremendous need to. If I can get all the benefits of the Raycast AI Chat functionality in a desktop app that is included in the cost of my ChatGPT Plus subscription, I very probably will.
Right now I just need to wait for the slow rollout to turn its Eye of Sauron upon me so I can give it a shot and find out for sure.
