I built a Chrome extension to chat with ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok, and more — all in one place.

2025-04-07

As a developer with 12 years of experience, I deeply know what's coming next at this AI age. Although I haven’t been laid off yet, I’m already preparing for my future career. After losing my development job, I plan to start my own business using a "build in public" approach. However, I'm not a business person and have little to no knowledge of how to start a startup, find a co-founder, or connect with investors. That’s why I’ve decided to build my AI tools as open source and share them freely, to build relationships with users and establish my presence in the startup community. I want the world to know that there’s a guy, Cai, who is creating something that can help others. Eventually, I believe I’ll figure out how to turn this into a profitable business.

This was my journal entry from February 17th — my startup diary, in a way.

Now it's April 7th. I’ve just released my first open-source toy project. It’s a small Chrome plugin ChatMultiAI that lets me chat with multiple AI models — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek, etc. — all from the same side panel in my browser. AND it's open sourced: https://github.com/caiyongji/ChatMultiAI

Why did I build this? Two reasons:

  1. Calling APIs costs money, especially for personal projects. And in many cases, the official platforms already offer richer features (like image generation, OCR, or better UI experiences) that the APIs don't provide.
  2. I found myself constantly switching between tabs and interfaces when talking to different AIs. I wanted a smoother way to compare answers, or just experiment with various models without friction.

So I built this for myself — and shared it, because sharing is what I promised myself I’d do.