Chunk AI Redesign (2.0 for real this time)

I know 2.0 released 2 weeks ago with updates to the Chat interface. Including support for 8 different Charts/Graphs, Code Block with colored syntax support and upgraded tables. This allows users to create data visualizations out of any numerical data available. Chunk will also create charts on its own if it feels appropriate. Your favorite AI Search & Research app just got better!

UI Updates

In v2.0.2 I released the second part of the 2.0 rollout for Chunk. Nearly every screen has been updated in some way on all platforms (iOS, iPadOS, macOS, visionOS). I’m really happy with how the redesign has turned out, particularly on the Mac. The Mac is increasingly catching up with the iPhone when it comes to active users of Chunk. So I felt like I needed to spend some extra time making sure the Mac app not only looked good but took advantage of the extra screen real estate the Mac provides. There’s still much more to do but I feel like we’re at a great place to build on top of going forward.

I’ve also improved how AI Models are presented. I still don’t have an ultimate solution to the nerdy problem of explaining the differences between each AI model never mind the difference between a regular model and a ‘Reasoning’ model. I know a lot of other AI apps artificially cap context windows (Chunk doesn’t) so I thought about displaying them. Let me know if this would be of interest to you.

AI Model Selection

I don’t want to forget the improvements made to iOS and iPadOS. More subtle than the Mac app but still needed and improves the overall experience. There are more features coming soon that I’ll write about shortly. I’m really excited this year for Chunk. Word of mouth is growing and more people than ever are trying us out for the first time. The goal is to become the best app to get real work done with AI in a beautiful, intuitive interface. We’ll continue to provide access to the latest available AI models from the biggest companies in AI, all for an affordable price. We also want to continue to innovate on the ways we can leverage the growing capabilities of AI in ways that help you not only bring your ideas to life but get your work done effectively and efficiently while maintaining the simplicity to use for casual search as well.

Chunk AI 2.0 is Here

Today I released Chunk version 2.0, just a little over a year since I launched Chunk in February, 2024. It’s been a harrowing journey becoming a full time independent developer and business owner to say the least. However every release gives me a rush of adrenaline thinking about how I can empower even more users to do more amazing things with a tool I created in my living room.

With that said, let’s get to the fun stuff! What’s new in Chunk AI?

Chat Improvements

Over the past couple of months i’ve been working hard on improving not only the utility of Chunk but also I wanted to level up on the look and feel of all of the apps. That started with fixing the text selection Chunk has had since the beginning. I won’t bore you with the nerdy details but lets say it was a bit of a technical challenge to both have all of the fancy formatting Chunk does in Chat and still support Apple’s native text selection. However as someone that uses Chunk everyday, I felt the pain of having to copy the entire text block and not just the specific text I need. After figuring out a solution to that nightmare, it opened up a huge lane of possibilities to provide a much richer experience when interacting with Chunk. So here’s just the start!

Charts!

Multi-line graph

I’m happy to announce native Chart/Graph support in Chunk on all platforms! By taking full advantage of the fact that Chunk is exclusive to Apple’s ecosystem, I’m able to use the powerful Swift Charts framework that allows Chunk to dynamically create beautiful charts on the fly. We’re not talking about just basic bar and line charts either. Chunk can dynamically create up to 8 different graphs and charts and will intelligently decide which to provide based on the context. Or you can just ask Chunk directly to convert your data into a chart. I hope charts will be particularly useful to all of the researchers, students and other professionals using Chunk to assistant with their work.

Charts supported in Chunk:

Bar, Line, Mulit-Line, Area, Grouped, Stacked, Pie, & Scatter

Next week, I’ll be adding the ability to share or save charts as images with a press of a button (as you can see, I already have that working now in my test builds). I can’t wait to see/hear how charts are working for everyone!

Tables

Another improvement to Chat is the improved look of Tables. Tables are great for listing and organizing lots of data. Now it’s easier to view tables, they’re more dynamic and honestly, they’re just prettier to look at. Just ask Chunk to put any data either shared, searched or from an answer and Chunk will quickly organize your information into a sweet list. Please let me know if there are other features you’d like to see added regarding tables and charts going forward.

Coding

Last and certainly not least (especially for me) is improved Code block support, along with Syntax Highlighting. Current LLM’s most popular use case is probably writing and debugging code. So it was important to enrich this experience and make not only reading the code a much better experience but I wanted it to look nice as well, on all platforms. Again there is still more to be done here as well. I’ll be adding a copy button to code blocks as well in the next update.

UI Consistency

The final part of this update, which many may not notice, but it means a lot to me, is design consistency. Who knew, building, maintaining and designing for 4 distinct platforms would be this much work for one engineer/aspiring designer. So it’s been a hell of a design journey for those of you who’ve been around since the early days (last spring) lol. I’m finally to the point where I can legitimately consider Chunk to have a design language. That doesn’t mean there still isn’t a lot of work to do, but I’m much happier where we are now. I still have a lot more work to do, (looking at you Settings tab on the Mac app) especially with the rumors that iOS 19 and macOS 16 will have a full design updates this fall. 😅

There’s a lot of exciting things coming down the road not just for Chunk, but the entire A.I. landscape. Every month theirs a new announcement or new model. I’m proud that we offer an economically viable way for everyday people to be able to use ALL of the top models (for one low price) in a single app. We’ll continue to create useful features that enhance and work with the already very powerful A.I. models and our custom RAG search technology for storing your documents. If you’re already a user of Chunk, thank you. If you’re new and trying to see what we’re all about, welcome!

Chunk is still the cheapest and most powerful way to interact with all of the latest premium AI Models to help you with your work, hobbies and just everyday search. Download Chunk now!

Chunk was mentioned in a blog post in the Netherlands comparing us to Perplexity!

Introducing Chunk’s AI Agent: Smarter, More Capable, and Ready to Assist

We’re thrilled to announce the launch of the AI Agent era for Chunk!

Starting today, Chunk takes a big leap forward with the ability to ask follow-up questions when needed. This means more accurate, detailed, and tailored answers to your queries. Chunk is no longer just a tool for finding information—it's evolving into a powerful assistant that understands you better.

But this is just the beginning. Here’s what’s coming next:

• Connect to your favorite apps: Use natural language to seamlessly access and integrate data across your tools.

• Automate actions: Soon, Chunk will be able to complete tasks and handle workflows on your behalf.

These exciting updates are exclusively for Chunk subscribers. Stay tuned for even more announcements in the coming months as we continue to push the boundaries of what Chunk can do.

Don’t miss out—subscribe now and be part of the journey!

Let’s redefine productivity, together.

OpenAI o1 Model in Chunk AI and what’s next for 2025

Happy New Year everyone! Sorry for the delay, there’s been a lot happening since my last post, including my city being on fire. 😢 Thankfully, my family and I are fine, but there are many others really suffering. My heart goes out to them and everyone dealing with this horrific experience.

Somehow, I was still able to deliver a couple of updates already this year for Chunk.

Improvements/Bug Fixes

I’ve made a lot of under-the-hood improvements to Chunk during the holiday break, including fixing a nasty document uploading bug, improving and updating image analysis for each respective company model, and cleaning up a lot of the UI on iOS, iPad OS, and macOS (still more UI improvements on macOS to do).

New Features

Collections got some updates recently. Now you can store conversations from Chat into Collections to help organize your work or research. You’ll also see summaries of each Collection you’ve made. When you add new conversations with additional context, the summaries will update as well. It’s really helpful when you come back to some work after a few days and want to know what was said in a Chat without having to read through them all.

I also decided to stop showing the paywall every time free users leave the Chat tab and come back. Even though this will probably cost me more money in the short term, I try to build things that I would want to use, and having that paywall pop up every time is very annoying and wouldn’t give me a great feeling about the app I’m using, even though it was free. It’s up to me to continue to provide value for users to want to upgrade, even if access to all of the leading AI models is already a great value for the price. 😜 I appreciate EVERYONE who is or has subscribed to Chunk. It’s what allows me to keep working on it and pay my bills. lol. I don’t have any VC backing, so I rely solely on my users, and I don’t want to take that for granted, even if you’re using Chunk for free.

OpenAI o1 Reasoning Model

It’s finally here! I mentioned that the production version of OpenAI’s latest and most powerful AI ‘reasoning’ model was coming soon to Chunk. OpenAI is slowly rolling out access to companies using their API. Chunk was luckily one of the early companies to get access. So as soon as I was able to, I added it to Chunk, officially in the v1.8.1 release.

This is my go-to model for any complex problems I have, including hard coding problems I run into and debugging code. I find it so much more capable and helpful than any other model for logic-based problems—Math, Coding, Science, and even distilling info from research.

However, o1 is very expensive to run, and I constantly run into OpenAI’s usage limits. Now that it’s in Chunk, I’ll be able to use it more…but Chunk will also have some limits on o1 usage, at least for now. Subscribers will get 10 searches per day when using the o1 model. These limits can and probably will change over time. Hopefully, prices will come down, and I can increase or totally remove the usage limits. There are some interesting use cases I’m experimenting with, integrating o1 deeper into Chunk. Exciting times.

What’s Next…

I’m currently deep into prototyping a new feature I’m working on for Chunk AI that uses OpenAI’s Realtime (voice) API that I’m super excited about! I won’t get into details because there’s still a lot of technical and business decisions to be made and code to be written. The goal is to make it even easier for users to have a literal dialog with their documents (and possibly other media). Whether it’s for research, search, work, homework, or studying, I want Chunk AI to be the first app you think of.

I’m also working on a rethink of the contextual documents side panel on iPadOS and macOS. I’ve gotten some feedback since Chunk’s initial release and users want more from this feature, so I’m totally rethinking how referenced content will appear there and what can be done with it that would help support how users are using Chunk for their work. Stay tuned!

Chunk AI responses now can include images + Collections

Like I’ve stated before, I completely rebuilt Chunk’s Markdown code a few weeks ago in order to support more complex formatting going forward in the Chat. Last week’s update I improved overall formatting for code, reports, bullet list, tasks, etc on iOS, iPadOS and visionOS. You have may have noticed in the past couple of days that images are now being returned in chat depending on the question asked.

The images were turned on from our backend search server, but the next update (probably early next week) will smooth over some usability issues with the interface regarding images and include the ability to copy/save images to your device.

There may be changes over time with how images are presented. We’ll see. I’ll be listening to feedback and how it can be improved.

As a bonus, next update will also include another new feature. Collections! We’re renaming the History tab to the Re-search tab…get it?…get it?? You’ll be able to organize and group previous Search chats into Collections. This feature has been requested by users for a while. Can’t wait to finally get it released. Hopefully that’ll be early next week! FYI…unfortunately a lot of these changes will take some more work to move to the macOS app. The Chunk AI Mac app uses its own custom Markdown parser so I have to do separate work to get it working on that app. Sorry to my Mac only users, but i’m working on it! 😅

New Update: version 1.7.1

We just dropped a new update today for iOS, iPadOS and visionOS! 🚀 Not a huge release but there’s a few changes I want to highlight that will make the overall experience better for everyone.

Related Suggested Questions

I’ve made a few changes regarding the Chat and the keyboard for the past couple of week but I think I’ve got it in a good place how. 😅 I recently allowed the suggested questions to be hidden, since they took up room on the screen. To take this even further, I’ve moved the related suggested questions underneath each response now, (I know, I know…just like Perplexity). I wanted to do something different initially, but I’ll humbly admit, it’s better this way.

Sources shown above Chunk's answer

Related Questions shown underneath response

Another thing I’ve been constantly trying to improve is the Chat and supporting more complex formatting for different types of text. Whether you’re creating a report, making list, or generating code I wanted the experience to be great for all use cases. So I recently rebuilt the way Chat displays content, and this update improves on that initial work by supporting more formatting styles and improves the overall presentation of content from Chunk, with more things coming in the future.

Added support for more complex formatting ie. quote blocks, inline urls, code, list and more

Easily save Chunk responses with formatting into the Notes tab. Upload to Chunk to search later or share it with others

How To Earn A Free Month of Chunk AI

Hello!

We just added a referral program to Chunk AI (iOS only for now) in the Settings Tab. It’s now super easy to earn 1 free month of Chunk AI, this goes for FREE users as well as current subscribers.

All you have to do is share Chunk to 3 friends and when those 3 friends create an account and subscribe for a month you can then claim your free month. The coolest part is when they use your link, they’ll be able to claim 50% off a monthly subscription when they subscribe! So everyone wins!

This is just the beginning. We hope to expand this over time to allow you to earn multiple free months or maybe even a free year of Chunk for helping us spread the word! Stay tuned!

Step 1: Share Referral Link from Settings to a friend

Step 2: When the friend clicks the link they’ll be sent to website where they can press a button to download the app and another button to claim their discount. We recommend they create a Chunk account first then claim their reward and subscribe to Chunk

Step 3. Once your referred friend subscribes you should see your ‘Total Referrals Redeemed’ value increase. Once it reaches 3 you’ll be able to claim your 1 free month!

Chunk Summer Updates!

I’ve updated the Chunk apps A LOT over the summer…a lot. 😅 I’m very proud of how far Chunk AI has come in such a short amount of time, but I’m also super excited about the improvements to come!

Going forward I will share release updates here (& on our new Discord!) but I wanted to go on record with some of the features we’ve added of the past few months.

Document uploading

• We’ve improved document uploading and now allow for multiple documents to be uploaded at once.

• Also by popular request, we added the ability to temporarily add documents directly while in Chat

Research Tool

• The Research Tool was added as a Search Type that can be used to dig deeper into a particular subject and uses more sources (up to 10) than Web Search. Also academic sources are prioritized when using the Research Tool to gain more credible information about the subject.

• (TBA) We have more enhancements to this tool coming soon. Stay Tuned.

AI Memory

• You now have the ability to store custom information you would like to Chunk to always have access to. This could things about your writing style, how you’d like Chunk to respond, or specific information about how you work.

New AI Models

• Over the summer we’ve added some exciting new AI models from both Anthropic & Open AI. The new kid on the block, Claude 3.5 (Sonnet) seems to be the current favorite of all AI Models these days. In my use I’ve been very impressed with Claude 3.5 and seems to perform the best overall for my needs.

• We’ve also added the brand new “reasoning” AI model from OpenAI, o1-mini. This model has proven to be super powerful when using it to solve problems particularly in the areas of Science, Math, and Coding.

• Of course as new models arrive we’ll add them ASAP. If you have any particular models you’d be interested in being supported that currently aren’t, please feel free to email us!

Other Updates

• Some other features added over the summer came from users suggestions. Like the ability to hide the automated suggested questions that appear that relate to each search. As well as the ability to choose ONLY the model as a source in Search Type

• I also totally rebuilt the text formatting in Chat & History. This allows for better formatting of more complex outputs like tables, forms and Code. It also allows for copying the text of specific text instead of all of the text like before. This has rolled on out iOS only for now, but I’m working on improving the macOS app as well soon and bring improved formatting as well there.

Why I Created Chunk AI

Greetings! This is my first post on the Chunk blog, which I hope will be a way to communicate more directly with users and perhaps offer insights on new features, updates, and occasionally, thoughts on the overall Generative AI space from my perspective. If you’re a Chunk user, THANK YOU! If you’re thinking about becoming a Chunk user, what are you waiting for? It’s free to try! 😁

A little about myself and why I created Chunk AI. I’m James, the creator and founder of Chunk AI. I started researching/working on Chunk in early 2023 and released it at the beginning of 2024. I have over a decade of experience creating apps and have built and worked on nearly two dozen apps during that time. Before I started working on Chunk I had spent the prior 18 months learning and experimenting with generative AI (like a lot of laid-off developers during that time). There were tons of “ChatGPT wrapper” apps that essentially repackaged the ChatGPT API into a “new” app. I knew I didn’t want to just do that, if I was going to build an app, I wanted to provide a unique experience and help people solve problems that perhaps other apps, including OpenAI’s app, were not addressing.

That’s how I started researching RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) technology and how it could be leveraged to 1) make LLMs more accurate and less likely to hallucinate, and 2) allow users to easily search their documents, books, or research using the amazing analytical capabilities of LLMs. I wanted to create an app that didn’t just let you upload a few documents at a time, but a space where you can “live” in and store notes, files and document of all types in a single location. Then provide the tools that would allow the searching of only the documents you needed at the time, without having to really think about which docs are where.

So I started the work on building a custom system that did just that using vector data stores, filters, tags, etc. That was the initial idea for Chunk. Particularly aimed at students, professionals, researchers, and writers. Of course as more users joined Chunk, YOU began to express your needs from Chunk that I’d never thought of.

In the past 6 months, Chunk has seen a lot of updates, such as the addition of web search, more access to different models, online note sharing, and a more in-depth Research Search tool that allows for detailed reports on specific subjects, relying more on academic sources than the broader web for answers and context.

The technology is moving at a rapid pace and it’s been a blast to be along for the ride. As AI models get more and more capable, it’s in-turn enabling developers like myself to create even more useful tools for our users. We have so many helpful features on the way and other ideas that are still in the planning stage, so it’s exciting times!

We believe generative AI is a transformative technology for many, and we’re just at the beginning. At the same time we do value the work of writers, authors, artists and everyone else this new technology can and will affect. We try to be responsible and thoughtful on how this technology is used, and the features we create.

Thank you again for choosing Chunk, we think we offer the best value in this space (cheapest subscription, access to multiple premium models, more features) and hope to continue to provide even more value going forward while helping our users, get things done and solve problems.