35
votes
Chegg is on its last legs after ChatGPT sent its stock down 99%
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- Authors
- Thomas Maxwell, Matthew Gault, Dua Rashid, Todd Feathers
- Published
- Nov 9 2024
- Word count
- 592 words
Am I being old and crazy that I would NEVER use ChatGPT for homework that requires answers? Then again maybe I don't understand how folks are using Chegg anyway....do their users copy paste and hand in without checking? If that's they case they may not care about the inaccuracies....
A lot of questions are NP-style, in that once you have the right answer, it’s fairly easy to verify it’s correct, but it’s non-trivial to find said answer.
That’s the tryhard version, yes there’s a lot of people that copy pasted chegg and ChatGPT answers
When I was in college not even 2-3 years ago, Chegg was just used to cheat lol. Since professors often re-use assignments over many years, many of the questions you'd come across would often already be on Chegg. People would just blindly copy them and very rarely verify if the answer they found was correct. As long as it sounded vaguely right, that's all that mattered.
If you're in highschool or college, what sounds more appealing. A paid service that may work better, or a free one that may work worse. I was broke in college, I would have loved ChatGPT
I guess maybe I wasnt broke enough .... It feels like getting another kid to do your homework when I know I get better grades than that kid. :/
Yes, but see, most people (especially kids and their parents) don't view college as a chance to get an education. It's nothing more than a ticket to be punched in route to A Good Job. Period, done, that's it. They view college as one long, annoying, expensive tax they have to pay in money and time.
So cheating isn't considered cheating. It's considered "getting on it with it" so they can get on with their lives and have that Good Job after the ticket punch.
It pains me that I have to point this out, but social media being what it is ... I don't agree with their conclusion. They're wasting their time going to college if they don't want the actual education. People like that, people who coast and cheat, are the kinds of people who screw things up for the rest of us. For all of society.
But it's just the world we live in. Everyone wants to get on with it. Whatever it is, they want it going and they want it going now. There is no journey, only destination.
For most entry-level jobs, they’re not wrong. The content knowledge is often irrelevant to their job duties. The deeper goals of learning how to learn often don’t manifest until several years in when it’s promotion time. They’re taking out loans for a ticket to access the better-paying entry-level jobs.
Eh, I used chegg in college. I never used it to cheat, but I often used it to walk me through problems I tried and got wrong on my own so I can find and understand where I went wrong. It was incredibly helpful to me when I was struggling with physics and chemistry.
Really depends on the student. I see 3 tiers of cheaters:
These tiers apply pretty well no matter the cheating device. be it a website of answers or LLMs.
If I were a student I’d probably be in the last tier, but I would just consider it to be … efficiently studying using the best available tools. Not any different than kids who hire professional tutors?
Interesting....I can only see myself doing the third one, but I'm not valedictorian and am super cheap so they would never have gotten my $20 anyway lol
I could definitely see myself using it if it had been available for the sort of garbage homework that was generated by the software for my Calculus textbook. As it was, I signed up for Wolfram Alpha to get through it more quickly.
I've tried using our internal coding assistant at work a bit, and it was pretty useless, though I suspect it's probably better at school type problems.
I remember when I used to try and Google homework questions for my history classes, I would run into the issue that the question itself didn't have enough context on the materials we were studying to give the answer that my teacher would want. That, or I would get an answer with way too much detail beyond my level. I imagine LLMs would be better at simplifying there, if they didn't hallucinate the answer all together.
From the article:
…
That's really hilarious. Imagine spending millions of dollars to create answer material, all for LLM companies to hoover it up and put you out of business.
The only surprising thing here is Chegg still generating revenue--how many of those could be users who forgot to cancel their subscriptions?
The company, for whatever reason, decided to pass up on two big opportunities to modernize their services. With everyone aiming for software as a service, it couldn't have been impossible to add, aside from access to their solutions bank, the ability to rent textbooks for an additional, flat amount. The second opportunity missed was with them ignoring LLMs entirely. I recall they purchased mathway, probably to compete with wolframalpha, but it's unlikely that these types of algorithms have changed much.
That doesn't seem up to them. All of the publishers have their own online textbook service they'd much rather you be paying for. Not to mention, they probably don't want their books rentable on the site that is essentially exclusively known for cheating.
They laid off another 21% of staff today
https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-sp500-nasdaq-live-11-12-2024/card/online-education-company-chegg-to-lay-off-staff-as-ai-tools-weigh-on-revenue-targets-qYYbTOKMAe8OblSEyLUD