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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

#81

Post by fxtentacle »

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?

I think the opposite is true: I'm deliberately choosing the usually more expensive DIY route even though I'm aware of cheaper commercial offerings.

If you hate ads, deception, and dark patterns as much as I do, then most software has a negative value. But I'll only pay for it if the value exceeds the price. That means there's a rather large (and probably growing) share of the software market that I'll just never pay even a penny for, because in my opinion, it has negative value. But it's not because I don't want to spend the money. It's because I want those companies that are peddling ad-laden bloatware to be a financial failure so that the market will intervene and offer better alternatives.

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

#82

Post by whyowhy3484939 »

johnisgood wrote: post #75
whyowhy3484939 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Thoughts? On what? If I understand you correctly you learned through people and practice and community.

On my method of learning a new language. It worked for me, and I found it to be the best way to learn a new language. I tried Duolingo but I got nowhere useful that way.

Oh, right. I think whatever works best for your personality but in general doing some exercises and/or interacting with people has been working for a couple .. ten thousands years at least. Hard to go wrong. I never heard someone make the believable claim that they interacted with too many people and it hampered their language learning.

My take is that basically anything can be made to work if you are properly motivated. Tech is - at best - a secondary concern.

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

#83

Post by namenumber »

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, constant gamification, attempts to pull me in with streaks and freezes and notifications and "did you know you can have us nag you even more"-breaks between the lessons I'm actually there for. It's gotten to the point where I'm just done because I've already paid for the service and i just want to be left alone to do the exercises, but they never let me get from one exercise to the next without having to go through at least two or three of those annoying "gamification and engagement" attempts.

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

#85

Post by add-sub-mul-div »

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…

Right. Something that businesses don't appreciate enough is that while an unpopular decision may sound small enough that they shouldn't lose customers over it, not all of them were happy to start with.

The timing of when I finally quit Twitter was when they shut down third-party clients, but that was after I was already half checked out because it had been in decline for a few years already (predating the change in ownership.)

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

#86

Post by wjholden »

charcircuit wrote: post #58
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…

Price point matters here. I keep getting ads for a competitor called Jumpspeak. They're very explicit that you're chatting with a bot, but their price is many times higher than Duolingo's subscription.

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

#87

Post by [deleted] »

zdragnar wrote: post #67
vinceguidry wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol. Linus didn't pour decades of his life into Linux to save a buck. Neither did Stallman with GNU. Even if the alternatives at the time only cost $15, (hahahahahaha) free alternatives would still have been well worth making. Software freedom has never been about money, and always been about preserving public access to a software commons. You might believe your local bookstore is a better source of knowledge than yo…

I agree with your point, but your analogy doesn't hold up. There are several topics I've had to go to book stores to learn more about because my local library (and the systems they connect with) don't have any relevant materials. I make a habit of checking the library for non-fiction books first. Sometimes it pays off, but often not.

[deleted]

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

#88

Post by astromoose »

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…

Correction is not always desirable. The goal in learning a language is rarely to be grammatically "correct" in the language, but rather to communicate. And communication doesn't need perfect grammar.

When I was working as language teacher, I was tasked specifically with teaching speaking. I would often use information gap activities. These are activities where two or more parties have pieces of information but need to obtain pieces from others in order to complete the task. Sometimes, these would us language forms (re: sentence structures), but most of the time they were free flow activities. It didn't matter how "correct" the language was so long as the idea was communicated.

To think about it another, how often do we make mistakes when speaking? Writing? And yet, we still managed to communicate just fine.

That's not to say there shouldn't be any focus on form, but simply that it's not nearly as important as many tend to think when it comes to language learning.

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

#89

Post by 827a »

To be frank, their curriculum (IME) is so bad already that even if implementing more AI could only maintain continuity of quality (it can't, it'll be worse), they're still a doomed company. AI might help them make more languages available; or it could help them design deeper & longer courses. But neither of those things remotely capture Duolingo's problem; their problem is that a ton of their courses suck, from day 1. They teach the wrong things, in the wrong way, there's no logic in the order of why words and concepts are taught in the way they are, there's no attempt at understanding why someone is learning the language and catering courses to their needs, they constantly teach incorrect translations or use really bad AI voice-overs which don't capture native accents, and they don't actually correct problems when they're reported.

Duolingo is, in my mind, the categorical example of a tech company. Think about what it means to say "we're an AI first company". Who is the audience of a statement like that? Who reads that and thinks "heck yeah"? Its not customers; customers, at best, don't care, but at worst have had so many negative experiences with AI that it reflects very poorly. Its not employees; Luis von Ahn is digging a grave while saying "no we're not going to kill you, we're just killing the contractors". The answer is: Its a statement for Duolingo's real customers, not their users, but the US Financial Markets.

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

#90

Post by ema »

BrandiATMuhkuh wrote: post #57

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 u…

It's not quite as effective as a real social connection but the para-social connection you get from say listening to a podcast in the language you're learning does work too in my experience.
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