Chapter 1: What controversy surrounds the AI feature launched by Grammarly?
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Chapter 2: How did Shishir Mehrotra respond to the backlash from experts?
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Chapter 3: What is the significance of the class action lawsuit mentioned?
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Hello, and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil I. Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today, I'm talking with Shashir Mohotra, the CEO of Superhuman. That's the company formerly known as Grammarly, which is still its flagship product. Shashir also used to be the chief product officer at YouTube, and he's on the board of directors at Spotify.
He's a fascinating guy, and we actually scheduled this interview a month or so ago. thinking we'd talk broadly about AI and what it's doing to software, platforms, and creativity. Then things took a turn. There's a feature in Grammarly called Expert Review, which allows people to get AI writing suggestions from quote-unquote experts.
And reporters at The Verge and other outlets discovered that those experts included us. And included me. No one had ever asked us permission to use our names in this way. And a lot of reporters and other authors were outraged by this. The talented investigative journalist Julie Angwin was so upset, she filed a class action lawsuit.
Superhuman responded to all this controversy by first offering up an email-based opt-out and then killing the feature entirely. Jashira apologized, and you'll hear him apologize again in this conversation. We'll put links to all this backstory in the show notes if you really want to dive in.
Throughout all of this, the Decoder team and I kept wondering if Shashir was still going to show up and do an interview, because my questions about decision-making and AI and platforms suddenly seemed a lot harder than before.
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Chapter 4: How does Superhuman differentiate itself in the AI productivity space?
To his credit, he showed up and he stuck it out for the entire conversation, which got tense at times. It's clear that Shashir and I disagree about how extractive AI feels for people and the value that these platforms can actually provide. I'm not going to stretch this out any longer. I'm dying for you to listen to this and I'm dying for your feedback. We really do read all the emails.
Here's Shashir Mahotra, CEO of Superhuman. Here we go. Shashir Mehrotra, you're the CEO of Superhuman. Welcome to Decoder.
Thanks for having me.
I'm happy you're here. I'm a little surprised you're here. I think you know what some of the questions are going to be, but I'm really happy you made it. I have a lot of questions about AI, how people feel about AI, and then a feature you launched in Grammarly, which is one of your products that made people feel a lot of feelings about AI. So we're going to get into it. Let's start at the start.
Superhuman owns Grammarly, you own Coda, you own a bunch of companies. Just quickly describe the structure of Superhuman and all your products.
Oh yeah, sure. So Superhuman is the AI native productivity suite.
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of AI on content creation and authorship?
We bring AI to wherever people work. Late last year, we changed the name of our corporate entity from Grammarly to Superhuman. I did that the scope of what we do broadened quite a bit. And so in addition to Grammarly, which is everyone's favorite writing assistant, we now have a document space called Coda, a very popular email client called Mail, and we launched a new product called Superhuman Go.
Go is the platform that brings you a network of proactive and personal AI assistance directly to wherever you work. So for people familiar with Grammarly, you can think about Go as taking that core idea and allowing anybody to write agents that work just like Grammarly does. Your sales agent, your support agent, so on can all help work with you right where you work.
And the core idea is that most AI tools require a big change in behavior. We bring AI where you work. Across our products, we see about a million different apps and agents every day. We seamlessly blend AI right into your experience so you don't have to think about AI. So that's what we've been doing at Grammarly for years.
And now we are opening that up so anyone can build on that with Superman Go.
So you and I hung out a few weeks ago, and one of the things we talked about was the fact that grammarly for most people is expressed as a keyboard, right? It shows up on your phone and your documents. You spend a lot of time figuring out how to make sure you work with things like Google Docs. All of those products are integrating AI in exactly the same way as you're describing.
AI right next to the insertion point, right next to your cursor. What's the big differentiation for you?
Actually, first off, I think very few of them actually are doing that particularly well. A handful do. But as I mentioned, we see a million unique apps a day. So the way to think about Grammarly is it's your assistant that lives everywhere. So you might be in a web app. So it could be Gmail. It could be Google Docs. It could be Coda. It could be Notion. You could be in a desktop app.
That could be
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Chapter 6: How does Shishir Mehrotra view the future of AI and creativity?
Apple Notes, that could be Slack, that could be whatever app you're using, could be every mobile application. We have for every one of those applications, we figured out the right way to observe what you're doing, annotate it in a way that is unobtrusive to you and to the application, and to make changes on your behalf. Doing that everywhere is the proposition.
As you jump from tool to tool, yeah, there's different types of AI in each one. Most of them actually don't have that. Like I said, we see a million unique surfaces a day, and the ones that do don't feel like one integrated experience. That's why we have about 40 million daily active users, and that's what they use us for.
It feels like the promise there is by looking at all the places you work, your tool will be more intelligent than disparate tools you might encounter in all those places.
Yeah, and becoming more intelligent is certainly part of it. I mean, I think for many people, it's just that one familiar experience that really feels like that virtual human working right next to you.
So is it consistency of experience, or is it better and more useful results?
I mean, it's both. And if we think about Grammarly, I think Grammarly is both the ever-present, it's very important, and very high-quality grammar results.
As we split the product into parts, and we said we're going to take the platform layer of Grammarly and we're going to turn it into a platform, that's what we call Go, that's about allowing other people to create agents and experiences that provide a high-quality experience that we can make ubiquitous for them.
All right, I wanted to understand what you think the sell of the tools is. I think that's very important for my next set of questions. The other thing that I really want to ask, which is a question I ask everybody, but I think the stakes are a little bit higher here, is about decisions. How do you make decisions? What's your framework?
Yeah, I mean, I think we have a lot of different thoughts on how to make good decisions.
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Chapter 7: What business models are emerging for creators in the age of AI?
I wrote a piece a long time ago called Eigenquestions, which is about framing not only the right solution, but how do you frame the right question. In terms of rituals we use, the most canonical one is something we do called Dorian Pulse, which is a way to solicit feedback and opinions so that you get rid of groupthink in the decision-making process.
But those are probably the two that get mentioned the most if you were to ask teams here at Grammarly or previously at Coda or before that when I worked at YouTube or Google or so on.
MARK MANDELMANN, All right. You can see where this is going. Let's put this into practice. You launched a feature in Grammarly called Expert Review that generated suggestions on how to improve text. It synthesized advice from experts. It used my name among many other names, Casey Newton, Julie Angwin, down the line. Bell Hooks was in there, which is hilarious in its way.
You do not have our permission to use our names to do this. You have little check marks next to our name that indicated that it was somehow official. People did not like this. I did not like this. And you removed the feature. Tell me about the decision to launch this feature with names you didn't have permission for and the decision to unlaunch the feature.
Yeah, I expected we'd talk a bit about this, so lots of different thoughts on it. First off, I'd say I understand and respect how challenging a world it is for experts and idea generators these days. I've made a long career out of being a partner to folks like you, to folks like the ones you mentioned.
It deeply pained me to feel that we under-delivered for them, and I'd really like to apologize for that.
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Chapter 8: What vision does Shishir have for the future of Superhuman?
That was not our intention. On the specific feature you're talking about, I'm sure we'll talk more about it, but just to give the high-level view, my view of it is the feature was not a good feature. It wasn't good for experts. It wasn't good for users. It was a fairly buried feature. It had very little usage. You mentioned it last week and talked about it.
It took months for anybody to even find it. All that doesn't really matter. We can do much, much better. I believe we can and we will do better. We decided to kill it pretty quickly. Notably, we decided to kill it while there was some feedback, well before there was a lawsuit and so on. It was just not a good feature. It was misaligned to our strategy. It wasn't the way we wanted to go after it.
And we have a much better view on how we think experts should participate in our platform, and I'm a lot more excited about that.
How many people work at SuperHuman?
About 1,500.
So 1,500 people. How many people decided to launch this feature?
Oh, it was a small team. It was probably a PM and a couple engineers.
OK. Inside your decision-making process where you described a way of making sure you solicited the right feedback and then have group think, it never came up that using people's names without permission would make them mad?
You know, maybe we should step back and talk about what inspired this team and what they were trying to do and what fell short. So let's start with what they were trying to do. So they were heavily influenced by both, by what we view users to want and what we want experts to want. So start with users.
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