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Grammarly acquires Superhuman

reuters.com

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Re: Grammarly acquires Superhuman

#61

Post by [deleted] »

chii wrote: post #40
toomuchtodo wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a bad play, like PE rollups but arguably with more potential for success from a "founder/startup friendly" perspective. PE, historically, is very good at stripping/optimizing/etc (think Bending Spoons), but I think there is magic in startups PE simply does not have that allows for a different, yet more successful, outcome (growing vs cutting your way to financial success). We should see more of this as large…

> large, profitable startups have grown into long term private companies with no need to go public which i think is a real problem - it prevents "mom and dad" investors from partaking in the wealth creation process, as they are not sophisticated investors and thus barred from being able to invest in these PE investments. Public listing has become a cashing out operation, rather than a fund-raising operation, if this…

[deleted]

Re: Grammarly acquires Superhuman

#62

Post by ignoramous »

lvl155 wrote: post #54

Grammarly has an existential crisis. It can be replaced it with free versions of the top models and they are much better (and I can control the UI anyway I want). In fact, many of these “web 2.0” business models are a few more updates away from getting replaced.

Grammarly can cut down their costs if they use those models themselves. The current LLM advancements aren't disruptive but incremental. What's the hurdle you see they can't rely on their existing distribution and expand from there?

Re: Grammarly acquires Superhuman

#63

Post by JoeDohn »

lvl155 wrote: post #54

Grammarly has an existential crisis. It can be replaced it with free versions of the top models and they are much better (and I can control the UI anyway I want). In fact, many of these “web 2.0” business models are a few more updates away from getting replaced.

not to mention languagetool

Re: Grammarly acquires Superhuman

#64

Post by treetalker »

anilshanbhag wrote: post #5

Grammarly is one of the tools I pay for, and I am worried about the security risks of using it. Really wish there was an alternative that: 1) Does local processing (local LLM?) instead of sending all my data to their server. 2) Had a lightweight Chrome extension that didn't inject many MBs of scripts on each page.

For a more-classic, more-human experience (i.e., computer flags potential issues, you decide and correct if necessary) there are proselint and vale.sh.

https://github.com/amperser/proselint

https://vale.sh/

Re: Grammarly acquires Superhuman

#65

Post by mrkstu »

nicce wrote: post #49
v3ss0n wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah localllms replace that job very nicely.

They produce convincing text but the grammar is not actually that good. A lot of missing commas, for example.

I would generally expect llms to mirror how the average human writes vs the most technically correct firm, so that would track.

Re: Grammarly acquires Superhuman

#67

Post by Aurornis »

JSTucker wrote: post #36

> The company claims its users send and respond to 72% more emails per hour, and the percentage of emails composed with its AI tools has increased fivefold in the past year. Is this really a good metric to aim for? Don't we want productivity tooling to result in less email not more?

Anecdotally: The Superhuman users I've worked with start skimming e-mails and sending super-short replies. Sending a "Good job team" or questioning something in sentence 2 that would have been answered if they read all the way to sentence 5 of the e-mail is the way to clear their inbox.

The inbox->outbox flow turns into the way to clear the inbox. It's not about better communication, it's about speedrunning their way to inbox zero.

The worst case was a person who would respond to everything with a one-sentence question, then respond to the response with another one-sentence question, and repeat all day long. He could turn a brief e-mail into a thread with 15 one-line responses that could have been avoided by spending more than 10 seconds thinking about it.

Re: Grammarly acquires Superhuman

#68

Post by rwc »

briandoll wrote: post #50

I've been looking to replace Superhuman recently. None of their AI or Team features matter to me. I just wanted what they originally set out to build -- a super fast, keyboard driven, desktop email client. There are daily paper cut bugs and search issues that have persisted for many years, and I'm not going to stick around through this transition which will surely make the product worse. What do folks like for deskto…

Mimestream on Mac implements GMail's keyboard shortcuts so there was no learning curve for me and I'm able to enjoy a desktop app experience.

Re: Grammarly acquires Superhuman

#69

Post by lvl155 »

ignoramous wrote: post #62
lvl155 wrote: post #54

Grammarly has an existential crisis. It can be replaced it with free versions of the top models and they are much better (and I can control the UI anyway I want). In fact, many of these “web 2.0” business models are a few more updates away from getting replaced.

Grammarly can cut down their costs if they use those models themselves. The current LLM advancements aren't disruptive but incremental. What's the hurdle you see they can't rely on their existing distribution and expand from there?

That’s true but I can replace Grammarly in a few hours with Claude. 99% of the functionality. Then, I can spend a couple more days to add stuff that they can’t add due to copyright.
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