Chegg Embraced AI. ChatGPT Ate Its Lunch Anyway

In subjects such as engineering, chemistry, and statistics, which drive significant traffic to Chegg but often involve diagrams, there was a sense that relying too heavily on AI to parse visual information was unreasonable, the former employees say. So the ethics of unleashing an imperfect product gave Chegg pause. “We knew generative was coming down the pike,” says one former executive. “Text analysis was easy to embrace in the short run.”

In 2020, OpenAI’s GPT-3 model was released and made text generation much better. Some machine-learning leaders at Chegg wanted to get their…