81–90 of 144 posts
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.
yet they recently received a billion dollars in financing this year?!
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?
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> 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?
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.
This is a bit surprising. I even didn't expect Grammarly to have the cash, I used to be a paying customer of theirs when I was writing papers, but apparently with AI I don't even need the free Grammarly anymore.
They might have a lot more cash than you'd expect: https://www.grammarly.com/blog/company/grammarly-announces-g...
The founder of Superhuman has really got this playbook down. I remember his previous startup (Rapportive?) was another email-improving thing that got acquired by LinkedIn fairly quickly and got shut down. Not a bad gig.
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.
FWIW: latest Chrome ships built-in AI APIs https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/prompt-api so it should be a matter of time to have a replacement extension using this local API. However the built-in model is Gemini Nano.
> 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…
> The knowledge sector’s insistence that productivity is a personal issue seems to have created a so-called “tragedy of the commons” scenario, in which individuals making reasonable decisions for themselves insure a negative group outcome. An office worker’s life is dramatically easier, in the moment, if she can send messages that demand immediate responses from her colleagues, or disseminate requests and tasks to others in an ad-hoc manner. But the cumulative effect of such constant, unstructured communication is cognitively harmful: on the receiving end, the deluge of information and demands makes work unmanageable. There’s little that any one individual can do to fix the problem. A worker might send fewer e-mail requests to others, and become more structured about her work, but she’ll still receive requests from everyone else; meanwhile, if she decides to decrease the amount of time that she spends engaging with this harried digital din, she slows down other people’s work, creating frustration.
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-rise...
I'm hesitant to call the email-skimming workflow that you mentioned a "reasonable decision," but I think the point still stands about how one person speedrunning their inbox can make everyone else's inboxes that much worse.