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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

#51

Post by vitro »

I'll chip in with my shameless plug - Latudio [0]. A language learning app where all the content was written and audio recorded by real humans™.

We purposedly went that way, with no ads and a one-time payment option.

I feel that human touch is what makes our interactions special as everyone is different, unique, imperfect while being the same like everyone else, in a way...

Howewer as a relatively new and bootstrapped app in the market we have still some way to go. As a next step we are investigating how to add audiobooks and podcasts. Would someone be interested to cooperate?

To se what's inside: [1]

[0] https://www.latudio.com

[1] https://www.latudio.com/whats-inside

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

#52

Post by [deleted] »

dbbk wrote: post #44
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…

This isn't a secret though, their CEO openly said on the Decoder podcast this is their strategy so I don't know how that passed her by

[deleted]

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

#53

Post by sandinmyjoints »

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.

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

#54

Post by [deleted] »

90s_dev wrote: post #8
godzillabrennus wrote: post #3

Their 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?

[deleted]

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

#55

Post by dotancohen »

vendiddy wrote: post #24
godzillabrennus wrote: post #3

Their 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 do think AI could be a better language tutor than an average language teacher, but I don't think Duolingo's approach is very effective. The ideal AI-powered tutor would work more closely to a private language tutor. It would speak with you and gradually integrating language concepts into the conversation. When you make mistakes, it could correct you on the spot and keep track of where your strengths and weaknesses…

You should look at HelloTalk. It's real people communicating in each others' language. Unbelievably great service, almost as good as sitting down to a coffee with someone.

Actually, in some ways better. HelloTalk has a "correct the other person's sentence" feature that shows an inline diff, yet it's simple enough for people who have never heard the term diff.

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

#56

Post by a0123 »

vendiddy wrote: post #24
godzillabrennus wrote: post #3

Their 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 do think AI could be a better language tutor than an average language teacher, but I don't think Duolingo's approach is very effective. The ideal AI-powered tutor would work more closely to a private language tutor. It would speak with you and gradually integrating language concepts into the conversation. When you make mistakes, it could correct you on the spot and keep track of where your strengths and weaknesses…

> I do think AI could be a better language tutor than an average language teacher, but I don't think Duolingo's approach is very effective.

No offense, I can tell you're neither a linguist nor a language teacher.

This is one are where the human input is invaluable and irreplaceable. Because language (the complex kind) is inherently human. It quite literally is.

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

#57

Post by BrandiATMuhkuh »

I wish I had the funds and a curriculum expert on my side to build a language learning app with LLMs.

Part of my PhD thesis[1] was to study how robots (voice agents) can influence human language. The key component is a social connection. Back in 2017 I did that in the lab. But the research is pretty clear about it.

Also my own experience (trying to learn Arabic) is, that I only remember words/phrases which I picked up during social gathering (camping in the dessert).

The "perfect" learning app would work like how children learn: by interacting with their social surroundings. No need to learn the vocabulary or the alphabet at the beginning. The hard part is, to create a social interaction between the learner and the AI that evolves over time.

[1] https://ir.canterbury.ac.nz/items/7da0e989-aa9f-4b92-86bd-92...

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

#58

Post by charcircuit »

techpineapple wrote: post #6

It’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.

If Duolingo doesn't disrupt themselves with AI someone else will. The strength of LLMs makes them now rival usefulness of SRS for language learning.

>human curation will be a selling point

Look at the success of TikTok. Automated recommendations enabled it to become one of the top apps in existence. There is not evidence that consumers care who curated the content. The quality of the recommendation is experimentally proven to be much much more important.

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

#59

Post by lolinder »

zdragnar wrote: post #47
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…

Learning a new language to any degree of proficiency requires motivation. It's easy to start and hard to continue if you're not willing to put in the effort. There's a valid argument to be made that gamification helps to provide that motivation, but the argument doesn't hold up if the users aren't actually becoming proficient by using the app. In other words, gamification isn't inherently bad, but their motivations d…

Agreed. Duolingo started out on the right foot: they had gamification, but not too much of it, and they clearly cared about helping you learn. For a long time it was the most highly recommended app for learning new languages and that wasn't just naivete, it actually did work.

That's changed gradually over the last few years as they switched from using gamification in pursuit of learning to using a veneer of learning as a pitch to get people to try their game.

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

#60

Post by jrflowers »

godzillabrennus wrote: post #3

Their 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 cannot imagine being the CEO of a software company and proudly proclaiming that some other software — which we do not make and can easily be had very cheap or for free— is better fit for purpose than what we’ve been able to accomplish in over a decade with almost a thousand employees, and expecting that to impress investors or users or both.

Like that would be like the Chipotle CEO proudly announcing that they’re firing their workers because they’re getting all of their ingredients from Taco Bell now due to “Taco Bell’s system being so much easier to operate” and “Taco Bell is so cheap and they have so many locations”

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