Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails

It's not stinginess, it's value.

If an LLM can teach me a language, why wouldn't I go straight to the source and use GPT or Claude and customize it to my exact needs.

I feel like so many AI products these days won't be around a few years from now once more people find out that all their doing is providing a slightly different UI to what you can get directly from OAI, Anthropic, Google for cheaper and better and more tailored to you.

...He was born to a middle-class, single mother in Guatemala. Sometimes just reading someone's name doesn't give you the information you're looking for. The only real evidence of "privilege" in his upbringing was the chance to attend The American School of Guatemala and his mother being a doctor.

My wife quit Duolingo the week before this announcement after years of watching Duolingo prioritize attention manipulation over learning. She had a nearly 6-year streak and was on the paid version at the time, but realized that it wasn't actually helping her learn any more: she'd at some point begun maintaining a streak just for the sake of maintaining a streak.

The best documentation for Duolingo's decline is this article from a few years ago [0]. It's a piece by Duolingo's CPO (who was a former Zynga employee) where he discusses at length how Duolingo started using streaks and other gamification techniques to optimize their numbers. He has a lot to say about manipulating users into spending more time with them, but in the entire piece he barely even gives a token nod to the supposed mission of the company to help people learn. The date he cites for the beginning of their efforts to optimize numbers pretty closely correlates to my sense for when my wife began to complain about Duolingo feeling more and more manipulative and less and less useful.

This past month they finally jumped the shark and she decided to quit after 6+ years. The subsequent announcement that they'd be using AI to churn out even more lackluster content gave us a good laugh but was hardly surprising: they'd given up on prioritizing learning a long while ago.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34977435

LLMs cannot "teach you a language". They make for cool demos to show off. They can perhaps be a building block of a proper language learning experience.

Then again, the only languages I actually learned - besides my mother tongue - to the point of being able to do things were English and Latin and both were very much acquired offline. I have plenty of experience with language learning apps and I'm not convinced tech is the solution or even part of the solution.