ChatGPT just got a bump to its coding powers

By Andrew Tarantola Published December 19, 2024

ChatGPT collaborating with Notion — OpenAI

For its penultimate 12 Days of OpenAI announcement, the company revealed a trio of updates to ChatGPT’s app integration on Thursday, which should make using the AI in conjunction with other programs on your desktop less of a chore.

OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT’s ability to collaborate with select developer-focused macOS apps, specifically VS Code, Xcode, TextEdit, Terminal, and iTerm2, back in November. Rather than needing to copy and paste code into ChatGPT, this feature allows the chatbot to pull specified content from the coding app as you enter your text prompt. ChatGPT, however, cannot generate code directly into the app, as Cursor or GitHub Copilot are able to.

Recommended Videos

On Thursday, the company announced that its chatbot will now be able to read data from many more coding programs and IDEs. Those include BBEdit, MatLab, Nova, Script Editor, and TextMate; Jetbrains IDEs like Android Studio, AppCode, CLion, DataGrip, GoLand, IntelliJ IDEA, PHPStorm, PyCharm, RubyMine, RustRover, and WebStorm; as well as VS Code forks like VSCode Insiders, VSCodium, Cursor, and WindSurf. ChatGPT will also now integrate with the Prompt and Warp terminal apps.

What’s more, ChatGPT’s interoperability is no longer limited to coding. It can now work with Apple Notes, Notion, and Quip for more conventional text generation and editing tasks. OpenAI also announced that it is incorporating its Advanced Voice Mode feature into the desktop app workflow. Users will be able to launch AVM in a separate window to answer questions and provide suggestions as they work. In Thursday’s demo, the OpenAI team asked AVM’s Santa character for help in crafting the ideal holiday song playlist.

Every paid tier subscriber (that’s Plus, Pro, Team, Enterprise, and Edu) now has access to the expanded feature. To try it for yourself, you will need to manually select the app you want ChatGPT to interface with using a drop-down menu on the AI’s desktop UI.

Andrew Tarantola

Former Computing Writer

Andrew Tarantola is a journalist with more than a decade reporting on emerging technologies ranging from robotics and machine…

Topics

Computing

5 AI apps with deep research features to rival ChatGPT

Deep Research option for ChatGPT.

Artificial intelligence brands are in fierce competition, and their next steps are to make AI tools smarter by allowing them to execute deep search functions that can provide expert-level results and analyze larger amounts of information in a shorter time. Several companies have announced deep research features in recent weeks and months that excel in areas such as finance, science, marketing, and academics. Research that would have taken a person weeks or months can be achieved in a fraction of the time, with a properly detailed prompt.

Deep research features are considered AI agents that can work independently and will allow you to make a query and let the AI process for several minutes while it generates the information and returns when it is finished to display the results. They are considered the first steps toward the concept of artificial general intelligence (AGI), which some define as a model that can process a query based on novel data that it has not been trained on, and it can produce unique content. However, we’re not quite there yet, and the main premise of deep research tools is processing large amounts of data and making it easier to understand.

Computing

It’s not your imagination — ChatGPT models actually do hallucinate more now

Deep Research option for ChatGPT.

OpenAI released a paper last week detailing various internal tests and findings about its o3 and o4-mini models. The main differences between these newer models and the first versions of ChatGPT we saw in 2023 are their advanced reasoning and multimodal capabilities. o3 and o4-mini can generate images, search the web, automate tasks, remember old conversations, and solve complex problems. However, it seems these improvements have also brought unexpected side effects.

What do the tests say?

Computing

ChatGPT’s awesome Deep Research gets a light version and goes free for all

Deep Research option for ChatGPT.

There’s a lot of AI hype floating around, and it seems every brand wants to cram it into their products. But there are a few remarkably useful tools, as well, though they are pretty expensive. ChatGPT’s Deep Research is one such feature, and it seems OpenAI is finally feeling a bit generous about it.

The company has created a lightweight version of Deep Research that is powered by its new o4-mini language model. OpenAI says this variant is “more cost-efficient while preserving high quality.” More importantly, it is available to use for free without any subscription caveat.