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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

#231

Post by dotancohen »

slt2021 wrote: post #223
dotancohen wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Because the "customize it" part is not trivial. That is the value add for most people who can not do that customisation themselves. That said, I've found LLMs to be terrific if the goal is to learn the rules of language's grammar. But to actually learn to speak the language, find Hel…

someone will leak the system prompt for Duolingo and thats it - all their moat is just a single git leak away. you cannot build a moat with LLMs, so there is no value in using any service that is wrapper around the chatpgt

Duolingo does not need a moat. They are already an established incumbent and have market inertia on their side. They can afford to experiment and make mistakes, and then to backtrack those mistakes.

For what it's worth, I also stopped using Duolingo when the human forums closed. I often found as much value in the forums as in the actual course. And like GP, the hardest part was relinquishing my nearly 1000 day streak.

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

#232

Post by BeetleB »

przemub wrote: post #151
InTheArena wrote: post #102

Anyone who doesn't think that AI is going to disrupt everything in software hasn't watched as software ate the rest of the world. this is the latest iteration.

People behave as if AI were going to eat the software. I, and many others, don’t believe that is going to happen.

I'm guessing you're a SW engineer.

It doesn't matter what you think. It matters what high level managers/CEOs think.

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

#233

Post by ark296 »

I'm kinda shocked by how people thought DuoLingo was ever going to be any different. They are a high-growth startup, through and through.

The founder gets on podcasts and extolls the virtues of relentless A/B tests. They very openly admit that their primary value add is gamification (otherwise people churn from language learning apps).

I suppose the lesson here is that the words you say to Silicon Valley types you want to impress are sometimes overheard by your core audience, who may not like your opinions.

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

#235

Post by next_xibalba »

cyanydeez wrote: post #218
next_xibalba wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Duolingo is techno fascism? I looked up the definition as: > authoritarian rule, often involving the fusion of state and corporate tech power, where technology is seen as the driving force of the regime and used to consolidate control, suppress dissent, and erode public trust. I’m trying to connect the dots between the above and Duolingo.

[flagged]

Wait so Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are coordinating with the government and Duolingo to exert absolute control over our lives?

I searched about Peter Thiel’s views on AI seem fairly generic and cautionary. Maybe he’s lying?

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

#236

Post by kozikow »

lolinder wrote: post #18

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 a…

Mindless optimization of basic "attention grab" metric is why the whole internet feels like a slots machine. Be it reddit, Facebook, YouTube, any google result

Thankfully this won't happen with LLMs, as compute is too expensive so execs can't just take an easy way out of optimizing for number of questions asked

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

#237

Post by Zmajche »

sandinmyjoints wrote: post #53
zzzeek wrote: post #25

im re-visiting learning Spanish in my spare time and am working with Babbel, LingoDeer and a pretty good independent site morpheem ( https://morpheem.org/ ) that has the heaviest use of AI of all three. I didn't even consider duolingo as LingoDeer is generally better in the "cutesy gamified language learning" space.

Curious if you have tried (or heard of) spanishdictionary.com? I work on it, and our users seem to like it and find it effective. The name is a bit misleading—started out as a dictionary but now has a full curriculum up through a couple years of college Spanish. We don’t really do any paid marketing (or any other kind for that matter) so I’m always curious about whether people have heard of it.

Someone mentioned on r/DuoLingo so I installed in order to try it. My biggest problem with it was the UI and lack of options to configure it. I would really like options to make fonts and buttons bigger. Altough I changed phone font size in order to use app, small height of buttons on the bottom are really getting on my nerves.

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

#238

Post by 90s_dev »

tredre3 wrote: post #190
kbelder wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus, being stingy even if you have money benefits those who don't have money. It's why I buy the $0.50 macaroni and cheese instead of the $1.69 version. I don't really care; either would be fine. But I don't want companies to succeed in charging more. I want them to desperately need to cut their selling price in order to succeed. People buying expensive products (assuming they aren't truly better ) are helping screw…

I love how you make being upper middle class yet stingy to be about helping the poor. You're not buying cheap things because you're cheap and want to keep more of that money (and thus pay less taxes that would go to the poor), you're doing it to save the world!

Many people do things like this out of a genuine guilt over having it better than many others financially and not knowing how to resolve that.

I really liked the solution in the movie Our God's Brother adapted from a play written by Karol Wojtyla in the 1940s in Polish who later became Pope John Paul II.

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

#239

Post by smcin »

namenumber wrote: post #83
lolinder wrote: post #18

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 a…

I got started on Duolingo back when it was still a "Help translate the world" app. I've always liked it for getting to dip my toes in a language and learn some basics whilst exploring the language myself through other methods, and I've shown my support of it by paying for Duolingo Super or whatever they're calling it for years on end whilst hopping on and off my language tracks. But it's just so horrible now, constan…

Some (but not most or all) of Duolingo's social and gamification features/social nags/upsells/"reminders" default on but can be turned off in the settings. But yes it's out of control and a strong reaason to disable Auto-update on the Duolingo app to not constantly the ever-more-AI-driven-nags/upsells. DL is becoming its own antipattern in the quest for revenue $$$ growth at all costs, e.g. reducing the actual amount of language being learned, beyond a certain plateau. I've been saying that here for a couple of years:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35287456

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35297240

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35679783

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

#240

Post by Terr_ »

joenot443 wrote: post #178
telchior wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I returned to Duolingo recently -- I used to use it heavily but set it aside for 2 years -- I counted 14 gamification popups in a row after my first lesson in a new language. 14! The damned popups lasted longer than the lesson had! I switched over to Busuu, which has blatantly copied some of Duolingo's mechanics but at least uses them with a modicum of restraint.

This sort of notification-barrage is a common problem in mobile apps with multiple teams and I really wish it wasn’t. I still use Facebook quite a bit and I’m consistently frustrated by how degenerate the concept of a “notification” has become. Some of the finest engineers I know work at Meta, I know it’s not a technical problem, I think it’s an organizational problem. For example… Team A ships feature X and sets the…

> This sort of notification-barrage is a common problem in mobile apps with multiple teams

That makes me think about how everyone defining an operational alert/warning thinks theirs is very important, leading to so many that users time them all out and everyone loses.

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