AI Disruptions: Grammarly vs Apple Intelligence #

Apple Intelligence launched today, something that as an AI enthusiast should make me excited. But honestly, it’s nothing to write home about. It’s hard to see any value in what was released, and for the most part, it feels rushed and janky. I’m a prime target for Apple to get this right. I have an iPhone 12 mini that I love and have no intent to upgrade (in fact, I just got a new 12 mini). The only thing that will ever get me to upgrade is some extraordinary new capability only available in new phones. And Apple Intelligence isn’t it.

That being said, there is one thing that I have been looking forward to with this release, the writing tools. I write a ton. And I do it all in Apple Notes. The only exception to that being that I edit my drafts in Grammarly. So I get into this terrible loop of copying and pasting between Notes and Grammarly. Having the equivalent of Grammarly Pro inside of Notes would be a big value add for me. So as soon as the release was available, I downloaded it to my laptop. Everything else in there seemed like crap, so I only enabled the writing tools and took them for a spin. So far, they have been great. Before I totally streamlined my writing process, I wanted to make sure that the quality would be preserved. So I put some writing samples into Grammarly and into Apple’s proofreading tool to compare. Unlike a lot of LLM tools, I was not let down. I found the quality of Apple’s review to be better than Grammarly. It didn’t flag a lot of the false positives that Grammarly tends to do. And as a bonus, all of the edits were available, unlike Grammarly, which puts lots of the edits behind a paywall. 

Having done lots with AI and ML over the past few years, I should maybe have a more bullish outlook on AI. I definitely do in the long term. But short-term, I am very skeptical of a lot of the current LLM products out there. Lots of them feel to be technology looking for a problem to solve. I think we will see lots of these fizzle out and then a wave of real value-add technology rise. All that to say, in this case, I think the AI tool will bring long-term value. No more copying and pasting back and forth for me. I don’t think I’ll be back to Grammarly. But I will be watching them to see how they react to inflections like this and what they do to keep their customer base over the long term.