ChatGPT Brought Down an Online Education Giant | Hacker News Reader

ChatGPT Brought Down an Online Education Giant

wsj.com

38 pointskamaraju20 comments

not exactly an “education giant”. a company that used to sell schoolbook cheating assistance, now being replaced by free chatgpt

I agree the "education" label is questionable, but it had a market cap of nearly 15 billion at its peak.

Dot-com bubble vibes

https://archive.ph/3nUKF

I was at Chegg during its peak. I think there is a cautionary tale here about the danger when a company's culture deludes itself about its product's value statement.

No one internally at Chegg admits that it's cheating software. I remember a slack channel where external criticism from an educator affected by cheating would sometimes be posted, and the consistent reaction was along the lines of "this person clearly doesn't understand what we do lol".

And yet, every single person I have ever talked to about Chegg Study has admitted they used it to cheat. Not a single person has ever said "Chegg helped me learn that material really well."

If Chegg has been more honest with itself about its service -- little more than a shortcut that students were willing to pay -- perhaps it would have used its available resources to establish a position of deeper value before a more efficient shortcut became available.

I think a good comparison would be something like Khan Academy (in its first five or so years or during the 2010's decade). Khan Academy is clearly geared at supplemental or even primary learning in some cases. And of course now even more so.

When I was going to college if I wanted to learn a math concept better I went to Khan Academy or its contemporaries.

Anyone who suggested Chegg to me did it to say "if you're looking for answers to your problem sets, go to Chegg". And usually people split memberships to do so.

I used to work at an edtech startup that was bought by Chegg. They let us write some code for 2 years, never knew exactly what to do with us (the managers they assigned us clearly had no knowledge of the problem domain) and then basically killed it off. Shortly afterwards, they bought a competitor.

It was apparent that the strategy was just "corner the market and buy up all the competition". Making students learn things was never the focus.

What about Chegg's textbook rental business? Is it a significant chunk of their profits? That was what I remembered them for but it seems to be barely a footnote these days.

That is how they got started but I don't think it accounts for much of the revenue now. That was my impression at least.

The main thing it did for education was organize resistance against the textbook cabal.

If it can be destroyed by spicy autocomplete, maybe it's better off being destroyed by spicy autocomplete.

Calling an LLM Spicy Autocomplete is like calling an iPhone 14 a digital walkie talkie.

Gave me a good laugh, though, thanks.

In many ways a digital walkie talkie would be much better than an iPhone.

I'd love to have a device where I can push a button and talk to my contacts instantly. No more "Siri, call Jane"... "I'm sorry, I didn't catch that." "..."

Credit to Cory Doctorow for the term.

Don't know why this (and similar) comments are downvoted; it's like this place is allergic to even discussing the POSSIBILITY of "maybe $COMPANY's business model just kind of sucks and deserves to lose the capitalism game."

Edit: And if it's "mean" or whatever, so what -- you're doing most everyone a FAVOR by pointing out BS anyway. Better they learn earlier.

probably some people (including me) think that ChatGPT is something complicated and impactful enough at this point and deserved to not be called just "spicy autocomplete".

I don't think ChatGPT took it personally. It probably didn't get upset. And you don't need to protect it.

"Deserved?"

Dude, it's a chunk of software. Please don't buy into incendiary loser ideas of these LLM's being particularly "special" or important to draw the wagons around.

the stock had lost most of its value before the popularity of chatgpt though...

It was pumped up incredibly high during early covid years because of high growth due to remote learning and the high availability of capital.

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