“There’s no kind of a priori right of this technology to upend our world, our lives and displace our own capabilities. I want technology to augment us, not displace us.”
But the technology that’s enabled Grammarly to expand its core offering could also disrupt it. Embedded in this new suite of offerings is OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 model running on Microsoft’s Azure. While many are now looking at ChatGPT itself as the tool of choice for writing and revising copy, Grammarly’s new CEO doesn’t appear to be worried.
“We’re not here to take a piece of technology and try to find uses for it,” he adds. “We try to find a user problem that we think we can uniquely solve and then we find the best technical ways to solve that problem.”Still, Roy-Chowdhury acknowledges that there are risks.
“We as leaders and as an industry have to figure out the responsible intentional path forward because we have the control as leaders, as users of this technology, we can decide how it moves forward.”As for Grammarly’s availability in Russia and Belarus, which has been suspended since Russia invaded Ukraine, there are no plans to resume until the war is over. “It's really a signal of support to our employees,” he says. “It's quite an easy decision.