Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails
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Re: Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails
#2I was happily paying for Duolingo Super, despite being unconfident in its pedagogy, until they announced they were replacing their human curriculum writers.
Dropped it instantly. I get the bargain-basement cost-cutting appeal from a (bad) CEO's perspective, but if I'm paying actual money for a service, I want said money going to humans.
Re: Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails
#3Their comments cemented to me that they have no long term value. If the ceo of Duolingo thinks AI will teach me a language then I’ll use a low cost LLM to get there without Duolingo.
Re: Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails
#4I was happily paying for Duolingo Super, despite being unconfident in its pedagogy, until they announced they were replacing their human curriculum writers. Dropped it instantly. I get the bargain-basement cost-cutting appeal from a (bad) CEO's perspective, but if I'm paying actual money for a service, I want said money going to humans.
If cutting costs using AI was really that good for business, companies would be using it as a competitive advantage, not advertising everywhere.
Re: Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails
#5[flagged]
Re: Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails
#6It’s kind of interesting for the CEO to position DuoLingo this way, because without the human element, DuoLingo feels like exactly the kind of service to be disrupted by AI, which I guess is part of the reasons he’s trying to take the foot out of his own mouth.
But it does sort of highlight that I think sooner rather than later, human curation will be a selling point, once AI apps become more the norm.
Re: Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails
#7Can someone explain the point of this article?
How does any of this matter unless 1. customers stop using this app or 2. all employees quit. Neither one is happening, especially the one where customers leave, because customers are not using this app as a form of charity to fund salaries of contractors.
Re: Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails
#8Their comments cemented to me that they have no long term value. If the ceo of Duolingo thinks AI will teach me a language then I’ll use a low cost LLM to get there without Duolingo.
I've noticed that a strong thread of the hacker community, including HN and the guys who wrote GNU and linux, are extremely cheap. Like, you'd rather write a product clone yourself than pay $15/month for the official product. Why is this? What's with the inherent stinginess?
Re: Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails
#9I stopped using duolingo regularly about a month ago. It's wonderful that Luis von Ahn says in interviews that he tries to prevent teams from cluttering the app, but it seems like he lost the battle. You can get 10+ pop-ups after a lesson. The friend feed is cluttered with meaningless achievements. The web app is tolerable, but the phone experience is miserable. But if you're behind a computer and keyboard, there are much more effective ways to learn. Busuu is a much warmer product on either device, with videos of native-language speakers to help with listening.
Duolingo has scaling and distribution. It makes no sense to scrimp for pennies on a product (e.g. English learning Spanish) that has millions of daily users. The AI radio lessons feel alienating and demoralizing compared to voice-acted stories, and the quality control is much worse.
Re: Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails
#10> “I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen with AI, but I do know it’s going to fundamentally change the way we work, and we have to get ahead of it,” admits the man who just a few weeks ago crowed about how vital AI was to Duolingo’s business.
> “AI is creating uncertainty for all of us, and we can respond to this with fear or curiosity. I’ve always encouraged our team to embrace new technology (that’s why we originally built for mobile instead of desktop), and we are taking that same approach with AI. By understanding the capabilities and limitations of AI now, we can stay ahead of it and remain in control of our own product and our mission,” writes von Ahn.
We don’t know what is going to happen, but we can plainly see what has already happened. The overwhelming majority of it has been absolute garbage. We’re not responding with fear or curiosity. We are responding with disdain.
To be fair, language translation is one of the use cases that are an acceptable and legitimate use of LLMs, but they still are not all the way there yet. If I were Duolingo CEO, I would have people doing R&D with them, but I would not be using it at all in any way whatsoever on any production product. Publicly, in terms of marketing, I would shit all over them. I would make myself out to be the non-evil non-AI tech CEO. Even if the R&D is a success and I later have to eat crow, that’s fine. I’m a wealthy CEO, who cares?
As for me using Duolingo, I think I’m going to switch to live human tutoring over video and/or in-person.