From first draft to final PDF, Macro is your place to write, edit and read.
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As a GP at Andreessen Horowitz, Kristina invested in Macro 18 months ago and we've been working together closely. I'm very excited for this webinar we're hosting together! I'll bring ML background and practitioner knowledge while Kristina will being the market perspective. This should be a great pairing, especially with your audience questions. I promise we'll go straight into the weeds and be transparent about what we're seeing. RSVP below!
Our biggest update yet ✨ Macro 3.5 ✨ is now available. Introducing: the Command Menu. 1. Search the document with AI enhanced word search 2. Access any feature of the app (e.g. insert, organize pages) 3. Ask AI questions about your document With the command menu, most features of the app are available via the keyboard. Next up: easy access to editing controls: PDF and Word editing features are now 1-click away in the top bar instead of having to use a side panel. We're now at full parity with Adobe and most of the features in MS Word, including (for the first time) stylesheet support for inserting DOCX styles. Previously, we wouldn't break any of your styles but you couldn't insert styles from the stylesheet. Now you can! We're really excited about custom styles because it fulfills our goal of providing a truly complete Word Processor. Even Google Docs lacks the features that meet the needs of lawyers, academics and students when it comes to typesetting documents. We've got it. Enhanced mode toggle: better switching between PDF and DOCX. Mode toggle now brings you to your exact location when you toggle between PDF and DOCX and is generally faster and more reliable. Change your name! Change you author name for comments. If you want to insert your company name instead of your name, or you nickname, you can do that. Ask AI is now 2x faster to reply and provides better answers. We've upgraded the backend AI pipeline to increase speed and accuracy. New! Click the `Share` button to share the document. For now, this creates a file thumbnail that you can easily drag into email or chat. In future we'll release link sharing with collaboration. Onward and upward. Our talented team of engineers is hard at work on v4. Check out the video in the comments from Mary outlining the changes! ⬇️
Which programming language does Macro use? Typescript - for the frontend UI elements we use TS, React and a bit of SolidJS. Jotai is the main state management library. Certain areas of the code like our fork of PDF.js are untyped and use pure JS. C/++ - for the document editing/rendering engine running in WebAssembly. We originally tried a Javascript approach but we couldn't get to high fidelity DOCX editing. Microsoft does HTML contentEditable in a browser which is part of why Word Online is terrible. Google Docs takes the principled <canvas />approach like us, but unlike us they don't have very good DOCX fidelity and lack features like custom styles and cross-references to name two. Rust - for certain PDF operations running in WebAssembly. Generally we still use Java because PDFBox has more features but some things made sense to do in Rust. Go - We're using this on the backend for some of our services. No idea why. C# - our DOCX comparison algorithm is built in C#. We did this because we needed access to the OpenXMLPowerTools lib for core DOCX manipulation APIs that we build on top of. We could have used another language and operated on raw XML but this seemed better. Java - we use Java for PDF manipulation (PDFBox). The main document parser (definition and section extraction) is written in Java. The first step is document layout analysis and the second is heuristic analysis of the document as described in my MSc thesis. Over time we're switching more of this to LLMs for (i) non-English language support and (ii) improved accuracy, but right now we're limited by LLM cost and switching costs. It's nice that the current solution runs locally. Python - for some ancillary scripts and tools like our parser benchmarking tool which Sam wrote way back when! On the framework side there are too many to mention but here are a few: TailwindCSS is by far my highest NPS framework. I can easily make things beautiful quickly. I recommend adding their color palette to your Figma: https://lnkd.in/efdmX6aw. We use Electron for our desktop apps, but we have a fork because Electron's launch time is generally too slow. Time to screen of the PDF is really important and people used to give us the feedback that we were too slow so they'd stick to Adobe. So around a year ago Sean re-worked this to do some fancy Chromium memory stuff so that the time to screen is really snappy. We use Pulumi for IAC - the engineering team tells me this is different from halloumi and much less tasty. I think they use it to provision infra. We rewrote our own authentication and permissions library from scratch along with an internal account management dashboard. Nothing met our needs for passwordless 6-digit codes that played nicely with electron and was fast. This post is basically what it means in a nutshell to make production software. Way messier and harder than a demo. The pain is the moat!
Macro reposted this
So cool to see Macro featured alongside Arc, Notion and other products I love from a German YouTuber I have never met but has 25k subs. Anybody speak German and can tell me if she's saying nice things? 🤣 One of the exciting things to me about building a new PDF/Word editor (macro.com) is that it's applicable far and wide. To our enterprise clients in New York to a German YouTuber using us for Dungeons and Dragons. Pretty neat! If you go to our website, macro.com, you'll see that we've updated it recently. We deleted the homepage in favor of embedding the product. More to come. Kudos to Sam for noticing a traffic spike from Germany and following it through to the source! Good detective work :D Video link in the comments.
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Making AI systems work at all is hard. But that's just step 1. Securely scaling to enterprise scale (BigLaw, F500) is harder. Come hear us talk about the technical nitty gritty of Macro AI — how it works, how to scale it, security, unexpected unknown unknowns — in this talk with Gabriel B. and Sam Kececi. We'll be using LinkedIn Live for this. I'm hoping it works better than LinkedIn's "Rewrite with AI" feature.
We're #hiring a new Software Engineer in New York. Apply today or share this post with your network.
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Are you familiar with Macro - one of the hot companies in LegalTech? Watch Thor Alden and Jacob Beckerman as they discuss their key takeaways from Dechert LLP and Macro collaboration in designing and implementing an LLM chat integration using RAG. Watch the entire SKILLS 2024 livestream recording at www.skills.law or each individual session at www.skills.law/2024. #skillslaw #lawfirm #legaltech #km #innovation #legal #leaders #summit #knowledge #LLMs #RAG #retrievalaugmentedgeneration
SKILLS REWIND: The conversation continues... One of our #SKILLSonline presentations this year included a Dechert LLP and Macro collaboration. Watch Thor Alden and Jacob Beckerman as they discuss their journey and key takeaways in designing and implementing an LLM chat integration using RAG. https://lnkd.in/evVAUbfG Watch the entire SKILLS 2024 livestream recording at www.skills.law or each individual session at www.skills.law/2024. #skillslaw #lawfirm #legaltech #km #innovation #legal #leaders #summit #knowledge #LLMs #RAG #retrievalaugmentedgeneration
Macro reposted this
Introducing ✨ AI Compare Summaries (see pdf attached). Using a mix of our proprietary parsing algorithms and large language models, we create a cover page summarizing changes in bullets. The goal is to provide a high level summary similar to what a lawyer may provide a colleague or client. Macro's document compare feature is already the best on the market, and soon it will be the smartest. Want to join the beta? Leave a comment below. This AI relies on our handcrafted document diff algorithm which is an engineering masterpiece. We co-developed the algorithm with some of the top global law firms. It maintains the same red/blue/green style users expect from the prior generation of tools but is fast, accurate, and can merge in edits from multiple authors and run many redlines at a time (e.g. 5 original to 5 changes). How can we make this better? Should we provide advice on which changes to accept and reject or is that going too far? Should it include *all* changes or only ones the AI deems to be material changes? Are bullets the right formatting or should we do a table or just normal text? #llm #redlines #compare #legaltech #fintech
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Here's a recording of our internal debate on DOCX stylesheets + our highlight menu. Which UI do you like better? Context: A challenge when designing a new app is matching existing habits vs. creating better ones. E.g. the Superhuman email client famously *blocks* Gmail, makes you do an in-person onboarding and charges you upfront (no trial). They know old hard habits die hard and they push the user to change. Slightly less extreme, but here's an internal video in our discussion on DOCX styles. Word makes the stylesheet really hard to use so users generally just use the inline styles. But this means that the table of contents and cross-references have to be done manually. We want to nudge the user to use the stylesheet ("programatic styles") not inline styles while editing so they're not kicking themselves later and having to reformat the document. Word does the opposite. What do you think? Too much change or the right amount?