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Duolingo Max, a learning experience powered by GPT-4

blog.duolingo.com

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Re: Duolingo Max, a learning experience powered by GPT-4

#131

Post by dyno12345 »

gardenhedge wrote: post #117
skizm wrote: post #71

I’ve got a trip to Spain in 4 months. I know a few spanish words now, but nothing beyond that. Will Duolingo get me to some level of being able to muddle my way through conversations (assuming the other person knows I’m a tourist and is using small words) in that timeframe?

No. When the reception asks if you want to check in or the shopkeeper asks if you need a bag.. you won't get that from Duolingo. You'll learn the word for an apple though and if your memory is good you'll be able to recall it when needed.

or my personal favorite, getting tripped up by a followup question from a server like "do you want mustard with that?" etc.

Re: Duolingo Max, a learning experience powered by GPT-4

#132

Post by MrOwnPut »

DrammBA wrote: post #112
skeaker wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, sure, that's more or less how a company operates. You make a new product, you charge for it, you advertise it. What's the big issue? This all seems pretty standard.

> What's the big issue? This all seems pretty standard I would say this one feels more later stage capitalism than usual, all it's missing is some tiktok influesters hyping it up.

Honestly, being able to build a company that creates livelihoods while simultaneously teaching people foreign languages goes against many of the historical and modern definitions of "late stage capitalism".

But I assume you're just using the super modern catch-all fad term of late stage capitalism that means nothing.

Also, from TFA: "Duolingo Max is available to everyone"

Re: Duolingo Max, a learning experience powered by GPT-4

#133

Post by gwern »

aeturnum wrote: post #20

This is interesting because my impression is that LLMs perform poorly on non-english languages[1]. This is likely 'just' a corpus size problem - but it's not like that is going to be fixed any time soon. That said, at least in language instruction there's a lot of meta material that will be helpful. I wonder how Duolingo is detecting when GPT-4 is hallucinating. [1] https://twitter.com/asmelashteka/status/16309662332…

The GPT-4 post/paper covers this: GPT-4 does other languages excellently, and performs on par in many other languages with GPT-3.5 in English. As people found that useful...

Re: Duolingo Max, a learning experience powered by GPT-4

#134

Post by vasco »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #86

Ugh. You can just feel the management layers in this. Management wants to do something with AI. It's so hot right now. Your product guy got an idea for a cool new feature. Tests show that users actually like it. It's helpful. Great. But now you need to explain how you made Duolingo money. First idea, your product has a paid tier, add it as a feature to the paid tier too boost paid user retention and new signups. Grea…

Making features without any monetization strategy and abandoning afterwards because you can't even justify the salaries of the devs working on it is way better? It's like you're mad at modern product development, ignoring the reasons why.

Re: Duolingo Max, a learning experience powered by GPT-4

#135

Post by threatripper »

vasco wrote: post #134
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #86

Ugh. You can just feel the management layers in this. Management wants to do something with AI. It's so hot right now. Your product guy got an idea for a cool new feature. Tests show that users actually like it. It's helpful. Great. But now you need to explain how you made Duolingo money. First idea, your product has a paid tier, add it as a feature to the paid tier too boost paid user retention and new signups. Grea…

Making features without any monetization strategy and abandoning afterwards because you can't even justify the salaries of the devs working on it is way better? It's like you're mad at modern product development, ignoring the reasons why.

Making a monetization strategy without understanding the feature is just as useless. If it's new you have to build it in order to understand it. You need to invest some time into the features first. If it doesn't stick then discard it early or iterate on it and use the information gained on building better features.

Re: Duolingo Max, a learning experience powered by GPT-4

#136

Post by Sol- »

Language learning in general seems like something that should be on the way out. All technical building blocks for simultaneous translation exist and modern speech synthesis systems can even emulate the sound of your voice in the foreign language.

Eventually it might even be considered rude to bother people in foreign countries with your broken language skills, given that you could use a perfectly serviceable automatic translator instead and sound like something close to a native speaker.

(Edit: Note that I would also find this development sad, but such can be the dehumanizing impact of new and useful technology, especially AI. Not much you can do.)

Re: Duolingo Max, a learning experience powered by GPT-4

#137

Post by tempest_ »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #122
chrisfosterelli wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fairness to duolingo, nearly everything duolingo does is like this. They are extremely metric and process driven (for better and worse of actual users).

I can tell because when I tried to figure out the cost of the existing Super Duolingo, I was unable to do so. The https://www.duolingo.com/super page gives me lots of information about tiers and benefits but never mentions a cost. I'm sure telling you hurt metrics. Fuck those guys.

If you are signed it the cost appears in the comparison chart.

For reference it is 10$ CAD per month or the Family option which is 12.50 CAD per month.

I assume they do regional price adjustments though.

Re: Duolingo Max, a learning experience powered by GPT-4

#138

Post by ssnistfajen »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #70
ssnistfajen wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLM outputs in Standard Chinese are fluent and coherent but the grammar style and choice of words are clearly non-native. I think the source training material just isn't as comprehensive as English, and contemporary Chinese Internet is packed full of latin abbreviations and obscure homophones/wordplay due to its evolution under severe censorship.

Awesome observation re: censorship. Last I looked into training sets, Chinese and English were the frontrunners by far in available corpus size, and benefit from a certain amount of government-enforced-homogeneity (a standard mode is taught in compulsory education). Arabic is safe from automation due to its limited exposure to the open web and extreme variability of dialects, and Icelandic will remain obscure due to…

Formal text wise Chinese is still a very comprehensive language. However in terms of user-generated content it has degraded severely especially in the past ~5 years. Internet slangs in English can be confusing too, but users have a choice in whether to use them or not. On Chinese social media using abbreviations/homophones has become practically baseline for certain common terms because these platforms do so much preemptive self-censorship due to the government's near-invisible red line that fluctuates constantly.

Re: Duolingo Max, a learning experience powered by GPT-4

#139

Post by dotancohen »

bundze wrote: post #88
dotancohen wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does that work? Do you just tell it that you are learning and to correct your mistakes, then converse with it in German? Does it infer your German level from your own chats with it?

Yes, you can tell it that you are learning the language at the beginning of the conversation in plain English and ask it to correct any mistakes. You can easily start a bilingual conversation with ChatGPT, some random example here: https://www.reddit.com/r/russian/comments/112xgp2/practicing... To show you what I meant when I mentioned "enriching sentences", I've just generated an example of a B1-level English senten…

Terrific, Danke! Viel Erfolg!

Re: Duolingo Max, a learning experience powered by GPT-4

#140

Post by mlekoszek »

Sol- wrote: post #136

Language learning in general seems like something that should be on the way out. All technical building blocks for simultaneous translation exist and modern speech synthesis systems can even emulate the sound of your voice in the foreign language. Eventually it might even be considered rude to bother people in foreign countries with your broken language skills, given that you could use a perfectly serviceable automat…

I mean at the end of the day, people generally like to talk with each other, unmediated, and be understood. They like being face to face. This is the lesson of the pandemic, even if it is a bit reactionary. People like being human.
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