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Comment by lvl155 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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This is such a programmers take. Bottled water is in a crisis, it can be easily replaced with tap water and a reusable container! Yet it’s a $47 billion dollar market in the US.

Grammarly’s value is not in having a replaceable product, it’s in the network, distribution, customer acquisition channels and integrations with tools. Like bottled water, it’s about being in the customers face at the right place and the right time.

You’re on the money and that’s exactly why I think Grammarly will struggle. OpenAI/Gemini/Claude will get embedded further. Gemini is already on gmail. Getting OpenAI and Claude incorporated is trivial. Guess what? Once Apple figures out what they’re doing with AI (which I hope is to buy Anthropic) they will take whatever is out there and incorporate them into iOS/MacOS just as they’ve done for so many third-party app ideas in the past.

I'm paying for most AI models top tiers and Grammarly. Grammarly is a phenomenal tool. It's not that LLMs can't do it. Well, they can't, but the more important thing is Grammarly's UI.

What do you like about their UI and what are your main use cases?

I can see room for improvement about the UI, but I like that it works everywhere and I use it to, obviously fix grammar and mistakes, to add/change our company's specific vernacular (finance), and to change common LLM sentence forms so that the readers don't notice that content was made by AI. Ya know, all these em dashes, "testaments to", "this isn't just X, it's Y", etc.

My favorite function of the UI is that, on any website, pressing TAB just fixes/improves what I just wrote before.

Agree with this. I love that Grammarly is integrated into everything, and I don't have to switch to an AI chat for minor text edits.

Exactly. Also, it's incredibly affordable, especially when you buy it on Black Friday.

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.

Grammarly has a function that replaces phrases that are typical for LLM output. Good luck coding that in a few hours.

Last I read, they run it off of MSFT/OpenAI.

I'm sure they haven't created their own model. Probably fine-tuned it + constantly updating a database of the most occurring phrases from all LLMs.

Why would using a more-expensive technology cut their costs?

It's the dot-com strategy. They'll lose money on every sale but make it up in volume.

not to mention languagetool

yet they recently received a billion dollars in financing this year?!

Yes, does not seem like such a crisis to me.

maybe not that crisis, but perhaps a crisis

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