The DEVONtechnologies Blog
Is DEVONthink an AI application?
Generative AI continues to dominate tech discussions, and with DEVONthink 4 Copernicus, we’ve integrated comprehensive AI support. This raises the question for some people in our forum or elsewhere on the internet: Is DEVONthink now an AI application?
Actually, DEVONthink has always been an application with AI integration. Since version 1.0, DEVONthink has been powered by our own artificial intelligence, a technology that still forms the core foundation of our apps, enabling many features like the powerful search or the contextual See Also inspector. However, this isn’t AI in today’s popular sense, like a chatbot. It’s rather a local machine learning engine that allows DEVONthink to find and use relationships between documents. That’s why DEVONthink’s original application icon featured a brain in a glass ball — perhaps some long-time users remember?
With DEVONthink 4, you can now seamlessly incorporate generative AI into your workflows. Use chat models like Claude, ChatGPT, Mistral AI, and many more for text work, integrate them into automations, or “ask questions” about your documents. You can also use image generation models like OpenAI’s Dall-E or Flux to create visuals (the title image, for example, was created with GPT-Image-1 in DEVONthink).
But, and we want to emphasize this, you don’t have to. Generative AI remains your private matter and is always opt-in. All feature using external AI remain entirely optional, complementing both the familiar features from previous versions and the many new non-AI features we’ve added. And as long as you don’t specify a model in the settings, whether local or server-based, DEVONthink cannot access them. So whether DEVONthink is an AI application is ultimately up to you and your own way of working.
We also know that some of you are not interested in generative AI and might even find the topic tiresome. That’s why, in the coming weeks, we will discuss the many other new features and changes of DEVONthink 4 in a series of blog posts that focus beyond AI (though a mention might slip in). And if you are interested in AI but unsure where to begin: In our post Where to Find More About AI? we show you two good options to get started.