OpenAI releases a native desktop app for MacOS
If you have OpenAI linked to Microsoft in your picture of things, that’s because the two companies have been commercially married for quite some time now. The latter, in fact, invested over US$10 billion in the former, support obviously crucial to its development and subsequent success, given the competition. But marriages take unexpected turns every now and then, right? Seems like this one just did: OpenAI announced releasing a native app for MacOS and not Windows.
Giving public ChatGPT-4o, OpenAI held an event marking the occasion, since this one is kind of a big deal: the promise is that everyone, freeloaders non-paying users included, will get access to “GPT-4-level intelligence.” Plus, there’s a bunch of enhancements, with better conversational capabilities (it does start sounding like a person when it speaks to you) being the most prominent of those.
Among other things, this event saw a rather peculiar situation: folks from OpenAI said they’re building an app for Macs, fully native to the system. The rationale, according to Ina Fried, the company’s CTO, is that Apple’s ecosystem yields more customers, thus, they are simply “prioritizing where users are.”
So far, there is no news regarding Microsoft’s reaction to this maneuver, but, in fact, it would be safe to assume that the move was pre-aligned with the giant. However, if that’s not the case, we may see some notable turmoil in the industry within the next half a year or so.
ChatGPT is useful for many things. This thread on OpenAI’s developer forums sheds light on what people request therefrom most often, with the top three positions being information retrieval, writing assistance, and programming help. Having this LLM on your side doesn’t mean you don’t need the basic tools, though, something for copywriting and code-smithing purposes. If you’ve been looking for software to fill such needs, check out the respective sections of the Informer DB:
Mac Informer - Developer Tools
Plus, don’t forget your copy of Mac Informer, a lightweight free updater:
