Grammarly Announces Layoffs
grammarly.comOne of the most annoying companies that ad spams like crazy in 2020/2021. i literally had to beg them to stop sending ads my way.
Now they are running out of money and have to cut staff. How ironic!
If Grammarly had any idea how loudly I advise people not to entrust their data to Grammarly, I imagine they would regret the surely hundreds or thousands of dollars they spent showing me Grammarly ads.
Until I discovered the magic of uBlock, a visit to YouTube always prompted a blizzard of Grammarly ads. I could never understand the premise of these clips, in which native speakers of English - specifically, university students and young white-collar workers - were shown having to use the software to help them to write emails.
Protip: if you spent nearly two decades in full-time education but somehow remain unable to construct a proper written sentence in your native language... your parents should ask for their money back.
Re: Your pro-tip: I suspect their ad is correctly targeted, and you're not fully considering why people might use their service.
Anecdotally, the individuals I work with who use Grammarly are among the most proficient speakers and writers. They can write fine, but they'd prefer to spend time writing rather than editing and Grammarly picks up the slack.
> Protip: if you spent nearly two decades in full-time education but somehow remain unable to construct a proper written sentence in your native language... your parents should ask for their money back.
In principle, I agree with you. But long ago, I worked as a copy editor, and can tell you that time in school has a weak correlation with the ability to construct a proper written sentence.
But no, nothing I've seen from Grammarly suggests that it would be much help.
I appreciate your protip but there are also plenty of disabilities like dyslexia that affect writing. I think you're both right and wrong.
"properly written"
Apologies for posting a completely off-topic comment, but as an ESL person this interests me.
I would have thought that both were different, but grammatically correct, with almost identical meaning.
"A properly written sentence" is a sentence that is properly written, and "a proper written sentence" is a written sentence that is proper.
But now I have achieved semantic saturation, and am not sure anymore.
From [1], "Adjectives modify nouns; adverbs modify verbs, ..." - so though you're right that both sentences are grammatical, I think a lot of styles would have a problem with "a proper written sentence" since what you actually mean to say is "a properly written sentence" (unless you make it clear that you speak of "proper sentences", probably).
[1] https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/grammar/how_to_us...
Perhaps.
The way I read it, the choice of "proper written sentence" gives it the flavour of "Proper. Written. Sentence" - as in, with an annoyed emphasis.
As always, you can apply rules to English if you like, but sometimes they are optional.
On any given day 50% of my youtube adverts are Grammarly lol
What do you mean by "sending ads your way" and how did you 'literally beg them to stop'?
I emailed their customer support and asked them to stop targeting my email account in all their ads. They said they did, but I still got a ton of their ads afterwards. Anybody with ads experience would instantly know their ads targeting wasn't working great and they were wasting a sh*t ton of money.
Why didn't you just filter their emails?
It's not their emails. It's all the ads you see on YouTube, display ads on random websites through Google/FB ads network, ads within xyz apps, and etc.. They spent a lot of $$$ on those ad networks.
Those are usually targeted through personal email addresses and device IDs. Impossible to opt out on users' end.
What was their response?
As I read it I cringed expecting him to call their employees “grammarians.” But it was even worse: “grammarlians.”
The company is called Grammarly, calling the employees "Grammarlians" would be the correct grammar. If the company was Grammar, then the right term would be "Grammarians".
The human “grammarlians” will now be replaced by “grammarLLMs.”
I see what you did there...
I've yet to encounter a cutesy name for an organization's employees that isn't cringey, but ooof, when it's used in layoffs it feels so tone deaf. I really wish the name fad would pass.
In Japanese, grammar is bumpou. I really wish they used that and called them bumpkins.
The distance to gremlins is uncanny.
How about “grammarlions”? Fierce!
I think this is one of the casualties of ChatGPT and LLMs. They can do grammar and a whole lot of other things all for about the same priced subscription as Grammarly.
I’ve both ChatGPT Premium and Grammarly Premium.
If I have to choose to keep one subscription, that will be Grammarly.
ChatGPT can do many things, and it’s impressive at generating text. But, people underestimate the advantage of good UX. With ChatGPT, I need to copy the text into a premade prompt or pick a GPT made to improve my writing. But, the writing style may not match what I want. Going back and forth with chat instructions is slow.
With Grammarly, I write the text, then click on the suggestions and adapt the style. It's orders of magnitude faster.
That's, to me, the Achilles heel of LLM chats: a specialized UI is more effective.
So, there is room for competition in many areas, even if they use the same LLM APIs to implement it.
You don't use ChatGPT to do your grammar.. there's more than just hypetool
Exactly, I use ChatGPT for more than grammar: article summarization, as an assistant to learn new things, image generation with DallE, etc.
But I keep using Grammarly for grammar because the UI is optimized for that use case. That's my point. ChatGPT is very powerful, but the chat interface is not optimized for every use case (is like the Excel of the next generation).
The parent comment suggests that ChatGPT killed Grammarly... but Grammarly will kill itself if they don't focus on a superb UX optimized for their use case. The differentiator factor for any AI product will be a laser focus on a good UX for their specific audience.
> With ChatGPT, I need to copy the text into a premade prompt or pick a GPT made to improve my writing. But, the writing style may not match what I want. Going back and forth with chat instructions is slow
Sounds like a UX problem that's trivial to solve with a browser plugin.
I have found the free version of ChatGPT does as good if not better than Grammarly. I honestly not sure if there is much of a future for this product over next year or two.
LanguageTool has a free version and a self-hostable version.
Wouldn't the hallucination problem be an issue for LLM's?
I guess at least in Grammarly you can be sure it is correct.
Deepl Write is also rock solid and free.
Weird, they’ve been hiring all January.
Announcing layoffs and pairing the announcement with something about AI appears to be a bit of a pattern at the moment. Something something psyop something something
Common Lisp looses to LLMs again...
Programming languages loses to application again... ?
I think they meant rule engines/symbolic AI loses to LLMs/machine learning again.