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Duolingo will replace contract workers with AI

181 points by donohoe 1y ago

jerryseff 1y ago
[flagged]
deleted 1y ago
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- deleted 1y ago
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ChessviaAI 1y ago
It feels like we're watching the playbook for AI-native companies emerge in real time. Duolingo’s approach, explicitly tying headcount to proof-of-automation limits, baking AI usage into performance reviews, and prioritizing AI-first systems over retrofitting old workflows, is a glimpse at how "AI-first" won’t just mean using LLMs as a tool, but rebuilding the entire operational model around them. That said, it's a double-edged sword. Contract workers were crucial to Duolingo’s early scalability. Shifting to AI removes human bottlenecks, but also human nuance — and teaching language is deeply nuanced. It’ll be fascinating (and maybe a little uncomfortable) to see if mass AI content keeps Duolingo's educational quality high as they chase faster scaling. AI-first might win on cost and speed. But will it still win on outcomes?
- krackers 1y ago
  >Duolingo's educational quality high Was duolingo ever known for high educational quality? To me duolingo's main pitch was a way to gamify language learning. Of course it became a victim of its own success as soon as you could "pay to win".
  - npinsker 1y ago
    I don't think so. I see its pitch as "the best kind of exercise is the one you do", maybe preferable to playing a game, but not an efficient way to learn. How useful it is to you will probably depend on how effective the sounds and streaks and home screen notification stuff is for keeping you motivated. Personally, I'm motivated by quick progress and outcomes (streaks don't do anything for me), so Anki is actually stickier, though I must be in the minority. Because they focus so much on beginning learners for whom nuance isn't important, this change doesn't seem like it'll hurt them.
    - morkalork 1y ago
      Being successful at Duolingo was always being like that guy who wins scrabble tournaments in French and Spanish without being able to converse in them. It's just a game and winning at it doesn't necessarily align with being functional in it. Otherwise second language schools would have long been extinct by now.
  - nicce 1y ago
    Far behind are the days when free version of Duolingo was playable. There are so many dark patterns these days to keep users coming back, gatekeeping something or otherwise to just push them to pay for the usage.
  - gs17 1y ago
    I don't think it was ever known for being high quality, it was known for being "accessible" and then they forgot about what their original goals were. They got pretty disappointing IMO when real languages were in need of updates for a long time (I don't know if the Chinese course ever got features like Stories) while they added a bunch of fictional languages.
- Aurornis 1y ago
  > keeps Duolingo's educational quality high as they chase faster scaling Duolingo is widely regarded as more of a game than a high-quality learning experience. People obvious learn something from it, but it's a running joke almost everywhere on social media that people can be 100s of days into their Duolingo streak and still not learn much. Getting people off of Duolingo and onto less gamified, more rigorous language learning courses is a common theme in the language learning world.
  - j_bum 1y ago
    Any resources you’d recommend? I haven’t used Duolingo in over a decade, but recently I’ve become interested in learning conversational Spanish.
    - secstate 1y ago
      Language Transfer
      - deckiedan 1y ago
        Massive plus one for Language Transfer. It's well presented, interesting, and kept me engaged. The whole concept is finding connections to language you already know, and gets you thinking in fuller more complex thoughts and sentences really quickly. The audio lessons are free on various podcast platforms / YouTube etc.
  - dbbk 1y ago
    They even explicitly admit to this. In the recent Decoder podcast the CEO said they will always choose engagement and gamification over teaching you the 'best' way. Which is not a terrible strategy. Most people learning languages are doing it for fun or a new years resolution or whatever. If you're serious about learning a language for real (ie you've moved country) then of course you're gonna go to a more serious platform.
- Zanfa 1y ago
  > AI-first might win on cost and speed. But will it still win on outcomes? It will be a flop. Either it won't get implemented like the C-levels dreamed in the first place and will remain policy on paper only or it will be rolled back quietly once reality hits. "AI-first" is the "blockchain" of 2025.
- alex_suzuki 1y ago
  Username checks out, no em-dash needed.
Aurornis 1y ago
There's a supposed Duolingo Slack screenshot going around Twitter with an internal announcement: https://x.com/eugeneyan/status/1917034784355979479/photo/1 https://x.com/eugeneyan/status/1917034784355979479/photo/1 Archived here: https://archive.is/zqk5z https://archive.is/zqk5z If I was an engineer at a company that made this announcement I would not be feeling great right now. The claims that writing code will become a smaller part of our jobs and that productivity expectations will rise set off some alarm bells. Some of the statements like "For example, we know that large language models work best with context" are alarming, as if the people writing this announcement have a very elementary understanding of how LLMs work but are making drastic policy changes based on their limited understanding. Imposing rules on developers like the requirement that they use AI for every task, no matter how small, and work through LLMs first instead of writing code feels like an idea that comes from non-developers looking to make a thought leadership splash. Everyone I know who leverages LLMs uses them as an assistant where appropriate, but trying to go full vibe-code mode where you act through the AI isn't a secret route to more productivity.
- darth_avocado 1y ago
  > Productivity expectations will rise (from the screenshot) This should tell you everything you need to know. It’s not about AI, it’s about using AI to use as an excuse to do what most corporations were already doing: extract more work out of employees without getting them a pay raise, and if they can’t provide that, get rid of them.
  - wodenokoto 1y ago
    > It’s not about AI, it’s about using AI to use as an excuse to do what most corporations were already doing: extract more work out of employees without getting them a pay raise What's the point of tools if they don't make people work better?
    - spwa4 1y ago
      > What's the point of tools if they don't make people work better? You just covered exactly that.
klipklop 1y ago
Number of people I know that used Duolingo successfully to be fluent in a new language: 0 Number of people I expect to meet in the future that used "AI first" Duolingo that successfully became fluent in a new language: 0 They don't even really have a functional product to begin with. Meaning that it can take the average person and help them competently speak a new language in a reasonable time frame. Vibe coding I guess can't make it any worse....
- poisonarena 1y ago
  I am fluent in spanish, and duolingo was really helpful at the beginner stage. When I was beginning to learn. I think between living in mexico (total immersion), consuming spanish media only, and about an hour of duolingo every night it was a tremendous boon. Mostly for learning to spell/remember gender nouns, and learning vocabulary.. I have tried other apps but the gamification also helps. I have now been speaking spanish for 9 years and have no use for duolingo when it comes to spanish, but I always recommend it as a resource to level up when you are a beginner.
- pacomerh 1y ago
  It's a game. Think of DuoLingo as a fun introduction, a springboard for serious language learning. People I know who use it have fun, but by no means are advanced in whatever language their learning.
- dustincoates 1y ago
  I get that it's popular to slag on Duolingo, especially in language-learning communities, but Duolingo is great for getting people started. I'm fluent in French and immigrated here about a decade ago, and I wouldn't have done that if not for Duolingo. It didn't get me anywhere close to fluent itself (Assimil was the single best resource, but no one resource can you get you to fluent), but it got me started and it got me committed. For that, I'm grateful.
  - Larrikin 1y ago
    This comment dips into the uncanny valley or sadly plant. It's possible 10 years ago it did help you but there's nothing about the current product that would have.
Larrikin 1y ago
As someone who waffles back and forth between how conversational I am based on the topic and how much I've studied recently, this comes as no surprise. Nothing about Duolingo gives the impression they actually want you to learn the language. It presents itself as an easy way to start, but if you are more than a single undergrad class into the language and have used any outside resources, it's an obvious waste of time. Everything on the platform is just a slower form of the most basic note cards. Anki does everything the platform does faster. Anki isn't suitable for all task but Duolingo takes the basic note card and makes you learn at a slower pace.
- theshrike79 1y ago
  It's gamified Anki with social pressure. If finding proper Anki decks for languages wasn't such a massive pain in the ass (Along with navigating the weird 30€ mobile apps for it, are they official, are they not? Can a free alternative do the same?), people would use Anki a lot more. With Duolingo you can just install, launch, pick a language and get going.
  - xdfgh1112 1y ago
    Anki is literally free on android. I made my own deck but there are plenty to go around. People spend so much energy making excuses for not learning a language that could be spent on... Just fucking getting on with it!
    - theshrike79 1y ago
      I don’t have the time to “make my own deck”. The UI for Anki is janky at best. I seriously tried making a deck for my kid for math and holy shit it was a chore and a half. The same with trying to find a deck for a specific language, no luck there. For iOS there are about a dozen “Anki” apps? One for 30€, the rest have some kind of in-app purchases. I’ll rather pay for Duolingo
      - malicka 1y ago
        The 24€ one is the official one: > AnkiMobile is the official iOS app and all purchases help fund Anki's development.[1] You could always use the web UI in your phone browser, Ankiweb[2], which is very kindly hosted for free by the developers. You could also write your cards as CSV, HTML, or really any format you want and import them, if the interface isn’t to your liking. Shoot, you can even use an Emacs package[3] if you want to. [1] https://apps.ankiweb.net/ https://apps.ankiweb.net/ [2] https://ankiweb.net/ https://ankiweb.net/ [3] https://github.com/eyeinsky/org-anki https://github.com/eyeinsky/org-anki
qalmakka 1y ago
I don't know, AI seems quite antithetical to what Duolingo supposedly stands for. AI raison d'etre is to allow people to do stuff they cannot do themselves or replace human skill with automated processes. Duolingo literally sells language courses, in a world where translation jobs are getting less and less necessary thanks to AI being especially great at translating stuff. Also "AI first" is BS, until AI has a 100% accuracy it is only useful as long as there are still competent people around that are able to understand what the AI does. A level of competence that gets harder and harder to get in a world where AI assistants allow you to get by by just pressing enter and producing poor quality slop. Companies and management want to _replace_ human labour because just they don't understand that AI works best _alongside_ people. This doesn't surprise me; one of the worst problems in IT right now is that IT is both pervasive and extraordinarily sector-specific. Capital is in the hands of people that not only don't understand how IT and computers work in detail, but don't even understand how little they understand in the first place
nope1000 1y ago
If people wanted that, they could just ask an LLM to be their language coach. The big issue is that with a foreign language, you cannot really verify that anything the model gives you is correct. And with how LLMs work, the wrong answers will look very convincing. I don't think that's a good idea.
- trollbridge 1y ago
  This is begging the question a bit, but yep. We all have access to LLMs, so why do we need a middleman like DuoLingo taking the output of an LLM and cluttering it up with irrelevant ads?
SirensOfTitan 1y ago
Right, so if the productivity gains were so blindingly obvious and immediate for everyone, mandates wouldn't be needed. These companies tried to quantify the productivity impact of work from home, so it's utterly bewildering to me that they would push these tool-use mandates without actually quantifying the impact LLM tools have on productivity. If it were just 'getting familiar' with AI tools to help define an AI-driven product mindset, I'd expect these CEOs to have more than a naive perception of the tools and their limitations. I honestly wonder where these mandates started--part of me feels like this is the nascent stage of a VC panic that their AI investment strategy might not work out.
- n_ary 1y ago
  I think, we need to step back a little in these discussions. We need to ask, what productivity gains are we hoping to find? In any knowledge or specialised work, operating a tool faster does not give great results, rather raises the risk of error and quality decline. Did duolingo once face existential threat because they failed to produce specific feature sometime? Did one of their feature suffer and cause user loss because it took more time for an engineer to write the actual code? Additionally, beyond formatting and obvious logical errors, every new code should in theory need some human review, which means more automated code means longer review. Assuming code is now produce at 2x, it also balances out that review will now take 2x. Additionally review is much more mentally taxing than putting out one’s thought into code, so risk of bugs and security holes also increases in the long term. While Software devs cost money, the job involves thinking, and that means it can’t be compared to factory work where someone is standing at next step to simply drill a screw in spotX and the next person will simply put on a cover. Despite years of effort, the attempt to make the process mirror factory floor(did anyone notice the open floor parallel to factory floors?) it failed. While many hate to see it this way, just like a surgeon will take his time to perform a brain/heart/tumor surgery, a SWE will do thinking, planning, coding and reviews. Giving a surgeon an autonomous bot that can spread the incision area faster or perform the incision faster does not mean productivity gain, it just means the doctor still needs to plan where to make the incision, how much to spread, what to chop off, what to avoid.
- corytheboyd 1y ago
dang 1y ago
Related ongoing thread: LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43829035 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43829035 - April 2025 (290 comments)
xdfgh1112 1y ago
Do most people using Duolingo have anything to show for it? It's a time wasting online casino app dressed up with intellectual vibes. Not surprising that a spiritually dead company has spiritually dead values.
n_ary 1y ago
In another news, I intend to uninstall duolingo effective immediately and actually in an effort to support human-first businesses and enroll into a real language course class where I get to talk to real human beings with same goal and have actual exams and people trained in teaching particular language. For me, Duolingo(uber for Anki flash cards of preliminary words for a 3 day tourist in a new country) was always an odd product. It is very popular among people because they can immediately learn how to say hi/hello, thanks, please in new language but after that, it is akin to learning to swim by reading different tips and tricks, without actually ever touching water or doing the act.
- stevage 1y ago
  I found it unusable due to the overbearing gamification when I just wanted to learn a language.
  - martinky24 1y ago
    The gamification is the #1 reason I uninstalled it within a few days.
  - randycupertino 1y ago
    I stopped enjoying Duolingo when they took away the tree and made it a singular route on the path. I used to like jumping around on the tree in a more flexible fashion whereas the path feels so boring and forced.
    - GardenLetter27 1y ago
      And all the other apps copy them :( Like HelloChinese (new course), LingoDeer, SuperChinese, etc.
  - billy99k 1y ago
    I like the gamification aspect. It keeps me using it daily.
- amunozo 1y ago
nextworddev 1y ago
Not a whole lot stopping Duolingo to be replaced entirely by a thousand ChatGPt wrappers
gs17 1y ago
It's pretty funny reading https://www.quora.com/What-made-Luis-Von-Ahn-start-Duolingo/answer/Luis-Von-Ahn https://www.quora.com/What-made-Luis-Von-Ahn-start-Duolingo/... now: > So, the largest part of the market was not being addressed because there was no great way to make money from them. Most people who wanted to learn a language couldn't really afford the best ways of doing it. We wanted to have a way to teach people languages for free. But not just free. > We wanted to have the best quality of language education, and offer it for free. Modern Duolingo feels like neither half of that sentence.
pedalpete 1y ago
I shouldn't be surprised by the number of comments of people saying "I'm going to uninstall Duolingo immediately", but I am. AI is increasing our productivity just as the loom did back in the early 1800s. So are HN members now the luddites? We're both the developers and the destroyers? Why don't we all just go back to coding on punch cards if we're concerned improved productivity will take our jobs? We need to look at what we're doing, and what we will be doing in the next 10 or 20 years. Do we know what that will be? No. But should we get out the pitch forks when a company says "we're going to do more with less people because new technology allows us to do that"?
- n_ary 1y ago
  You are misreading. The declaration effectively does NOT quantify or prove any productivity gain. It simply alludes to a possibility by forcing to adapt a new tool which is frequently sold as productivity gain. There is no real consensus or mass scale data except businesses with executives heavily invested in the AI adjacent stocks or prefer to be called visionaries like how SAP or Adobe got lucky by moving into cloud and subscription model purely by accidentally following random hype. Also in most software dev task, writing code is rarely if ever the bottleneck, it is the thinking, endless scrum bullcrap, management alignment, architects being too obtuse to not sign off on simpler solutions to protect their prestige, not filling empty roles, pushing teams to extreme and then suddenly deciding to throw away and start something brand new while asking why can’t the thrown away solution be adapted for the new thing or simply consulting/contracting firms intentionally prolonging the project to milk maximum billable hours. I have actually read the entire screenshot in that tweet and to me it read 50% as non technical executive pitched by some AI vendor about how cool their tools are and 50% of clueless people finding non existent nails for their new hammer. AI has benefits, it may give productivity gains, specially if you are sweat shops churning out customization of same ERP or wordpress theme. Just repeating productivity gain, coding landscape will change, life will be different 500 times daily because the seller of LLM(calling them the AI wholesale is deceptive, they are subset) wants you to do that, does not magically make those true. The whole trend is sickening and it needs to die. Replacing SWE is fine, but if SWE can be replaced, the justification can be used to replace crucial things like doctors, lawyers, auditors and lots of other professionals which will kill us all.
boh 1y ago
"AI first" has the makings of an Amazon Go situation. You theoretically shed labor spend by using technology solutions but in practice have low-paying workers do most of the actual work. "AI first" just seems like a dog-whistle for "we're struggling to figure out how to grow so we're going to cut labor and make it seem like innovation".
actuallyalys 1y ago
> “It helps us get closer to our mission. To teach well, we need to create a massive amount of content, and doing that manually doesn’t scale. One of the best decisions we made recently was replacing a slow, manual content creation process with one powered by AI. Without AI, it would take us decades to scale our content to more learners. We owe it to our learners to get them this content ASAP.” It’s hard to fathom why this would be the case. Isn’t creating learning materials mostly an upfront task? Obviously you want to update your materials and fix mistakes. And perhaps you sometimes have a new idea that necessitates an update or rewriting things. But creating lesson materials honestly seems like it would scale very well. I think about reading language learning blogs and forums and people would sometimes recommend favorite resources that were from decades ago. I’m sure something was lost in them not being totally up to date but honestly, persistence is way more important than currency, let alone “having a massive amount of content.”
- omneity 1y ago
  You are right, it doesn’t make sense. If that was a real reason then why not augment their current staff with AI tools to “scale content to more learners” and still have a sense of quality and human touch. Encrappification at play.
  - babyent 1y ago
    Revenue is down… We need to cut costs… doesn’t sound cool.
- vaidhy 1y ago
  You are missing a key point.. What is duolingo's success measured on? Not on how well their customers learn (they have already paid at this point).. but how much content is there (This number directly correlates to the signups). I am sure there are numbers around the subscribers vs regular content consumers and that ratio is tiny. For a lot of these kind of apps, quantity is the quality in itself.
  - actuallyalys 1y ago
omneity 1y ago
I already found Duolingo quite bad, struggling to make it past the repetitive and often not-so-sensical question/answers, but this finally proves it’s not for me.
iamleppert 1y ago
I hope they can replace their customers with AI next, because that’s the only way a business like Duolingo is going to survive. My prediction is it’s gone in the next 18 months. A policy change like this is designed to have a thin veil of innovation (especially to an unsavy board) but if you read between the lines this is some executive’s wild idea to shake things up because they are completely and totally desperate and really don’t know what to do.
- wolvesechoes 1y ago
  "I hope they can replace their customers with AI next" But that is the final stage - AI producing digital content, AI consuming digital content, AI writing code, AI reviewing this code, AI arguing with AI on social media. No human needed, only numbers growing.
spunker540 1y ago
A lot of naysayers here, and I get it’s more about the tactics and messaging more than anything else— but in defense of Duolingo (I’m not a user): There is a good possibility that in 5 years people have moved on from Duolingo because new ai tutoring apps that can perfectly tailor content to your level and offer unlimited speaking practice sessions, may surpass Duolingo’s “old-fashioned” offering—-the same way Duolingo jumped ahead of websites, which jumped ahead of CDs and cassette tapes, which jumped ahead of books.
- jhanschoo 1y ago
  This, responding in natively fluent speech and immersion and personalized correction, is what I hope Duo is saying by saying that they are going to rely on AI. Their current system just sets people up to fail at language acquisition.
- xrdegen 1y ago
  chatGPT voice app can already talk in languages Duolingo doesn't have and will never have on their old path. They obviously had to do this. It is already over for Duolingo. All we really need is some kind of Anki deck generator with audio and that plus the language model to have conversations with, it is over. They will look like a childish relic of the past.
  - GardenLetter27 1y ago
    Grammar lessons are also critical, especially well spaced for when you need to learn them. Ironically Duolingo removed all of that in the simplification and gameification recently.
conartist6 1y ago
Uh huh and will the employees still feel cared about do you think or will they all feel one step away from being pushed off the cliff
dgimla20 1y ago
Duolingo is an awful language learning tool (primary tool or only tool). Here is a Duolingo game. Translate the following into English: jvgug5 g54g 4g g45g ! g54 43 43r pgd0f Here are the words you need to drag and drop into order: fish to day cat eat My every eat likes Do 10 of these every day and you'll be fluent when you hit a 1000+ day streak. Do a lot of these to do more of them than other people on the leaderboard to see your name next to "1." with an icon of a trophy.
guywithahat 1y ago
I mean this seems reasonable, but the AI advisory board is likely to get in the way of actual innovation. They'll probably limit what models you can use for nonsense political reasons, and it'll just be another set of signatures you need to get to purchase an AI tool. I think there is a decent amount of logic to this though.
smlavine 1y ago
If Duolingo wants to be an "AI-First" company, then what's stopping all of us from being an "AI-First" society and just using Google Translate all the time? This contradicts the whole thesis statement of their company -- that it is worth time and effort to collaborate and learn with others, even when a machine can make it easier.
endofreach 1y ago
Just be thankful for all the companies destroying their "products" in favour of AI. They show that they won't be worth it in the future. A lot of companies will go away, and it won't be the ones "missing out" on "AI"... most of them will be the ones who cripple their product for some pseudo hype. It just shows they have no idea what to do, so just squeeze "AI" in... there are too many SaaS out there anyway.
teekay 1y ago
500 days on Duolingo and it has felt like it was produced by ChatGPT 3.5 this entire time. 500 days of learning various bits & pieces and not being able to have a simple conversation - but I could probably say "There is a monkey in his backpack" if pressed hard! I used to hate learning from actual textbooks as the conversations felt "dumb" or "forced" but that dumbing down as at least justified by having to progress from zero. Duolingo doesn't feel "plain dumb" but "weird dumb". So yeah, if they replace their contractors (who must've used the cheapest models) with O3 or o4-mini-high or whatever, it should be an improvement!
billy99k 1y ago
I feel like some of these changes already happened. I've been using it for 3+ years now and my listening practice over the last couple of weeks changed from words that I recognized, to a completely new set of words/sentences at twice the speed. The voices also sound like they are AI generated.

181 points by donohoe 1y ago

jerryseff 1y ago

[flagged]

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

deleted 1y ago
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ChessviaAI 1y ago

It feels like we're watching the playbook for AI-native companies emerge in real time. Duolingo’s approach, explicitly tying headcount to proof-of-automation limits, baking AI usage into performance reviews, and prioritizing AI-first systems over retrofitting old workflows, is a glimpse at how "AI-first" won’t just mean using LLMs as a tool, but rebuilding the entire operational model around them. That said, it's a double-edged sword. Contract workers were crucial to Duolingo’s early scalability. Shifting to AI removes human bottlenecks, but also human nuance — and teaching language is deeply nuanced. It’ll be fascinating (and maybe a little uncomfortable) to see if mass AI content keeps Duolingo's educational quality high as they chase faster scaling. AI-first might win on cost and speed. But will it still win on outcomes?

krackers 1y ago
>Duolingo's educational quality high Was duolingo ever known for high educational quality? To me duolingo's main pitch was a way to gamify language learning. Of course it became a victim of its own success as soon as you could "pay to win".
- npinsker 1y ago
  I don't think so. I see its pitch as "the best kind of exercise is the one you do", maybe preferable to playing a game, but not an efficient way to learn. How useful it is to you will probably depend on how effective the sounds and streaks and home screen notification stuff is for keeping you motivated. Personally, I'm motivated by quick progress and outcomes (streaks don't do anything for me), so Anki is actually stickier, though I must be in the minority. Because they focus so much on beginning learners for whom nuance isn't important, this change doesn't seem like it'll hurt them.
  - morkalork 1y ago
    Being successful at Duolingo was always being like that guy who wins scrabble tournaments in French and Spanish without being able to converse in them. It's just a game and winning at it doesn't necessarily align with being functional in it. Otherwise second language schools would have long been extinct by now.
- nicce 1y ago
  Far behind are the days when free version of Duolingo was playable. There are so many dark patterns these days to keep users coming back, gatekeeping something or otherwise to just push them to pay for the usage.
- gs17 1y ago
  I don't think it was ever known for being high quality, it was known for being "accessible" and then they forgot about what their original goals were. They got pretty disappointing IMO when real languages were in need of updates for a long time (I don't know if the Chinese course ever got features like Stories) while they added a bunch of fictional languages.
Aurornis 1y ago
> keeps Duolingo's educational quality high as they chase faster scaling Duolingo is widely regarded as more of a game than a high-quality learning experience. People obvious learn something from it, but it's a running joke almost everywhere on social media that people can be 100s of days into their Duolingo streak and still not learn much. Getting people off of Duolingo and onto less gamified, more rigorous language learning courses is a common theme in the language learning world.
- j_bum 1y ago
  Any resources you’d recommend? I haven’t used Duolingo in over a decade, but recently I’ve become interested in learning conversational Spanish.
  - secstate 1y ago
    Language Transfer
    - deckiedan 1y ago
      Massive plus one for Language Transfer. It's well presented, interesting, and kept me engaged. The whole concept is finding connections to language you already know, and gets you thinking in fuller more complex thoughts and sentences really quickly. The audio lessons are free on various podcast platforms / YouTube etc.
- dbbk 1y ago
  They even explicitly admit to this. In the recent Decoder podcast the CEO said they will always choose engagement and gamification over teaching you the 'best' way. Which is not a terrible strategy. Most people learning languages are doing it for fun or a new years resolution or whatever. If you're serious about learning a language for real (ie you've moved country) then of course you're gonna go to a more serious platform.
Zanfa 1y ago
> AI-first might win on cost and speed. But will it still win on outcomes? It will be a flop. Either it won't get implemented like the C-levels dreamed in the first place and will remain policy on paper only or it will be rolled back quietly once reality hits. "AI-first" is the "blockchain" of 2025.
alex_suzuki 1y ago
Username checks out, no em-dash needed.

Aurornis 1y ago

There's a supposed Duolingo Slack screenshot going around Twitter with an internal announcement: https://x.com/eugeneyan/status/1917034784355979479/photo/1 https://x.com/eugeneyan/status/1917034784355979479/photo/1 Archived here: https://archive.is/zqk5z https://archive.is/zqk5z If I was an engineer at a company that made this announcement I would not be feeling great right now. The claims that writing code will become a smaller part of our jobs and that productivity expectations will rise set off some alarm bells. Some of the statements like "For example, we know that large language models work best with context" are alarming, as if the people writing this announcement have a very elementary understanding of how LLMs work but are making drastic policy changes based on their limited understanding. Imposing rules on developers like the requirement that they use AI for every task, no matter how small, and work through LLMs first instead of writing code feels like an idea that comes from non-developers looking to make a thought leadership splash. Everyone I know who leverages LLMs uses them as an assistant where appropriate, but trying to go full vibe-code mode where you act through the AI isn't a secret route to more productivity.

darth_avocado 1y ago
> Productivity expectations will rise (from the screenshot) This should tell you everything you need to know. It’s not about AI, it’s about using AI to use as an excuse to do what most corporations were already doing: extract more work out of employees without getting them a pay raise, and if they can’t provide that, get rid of them.
- wodenokoto 1y ago
  > It’s not about AI, it’s about using AI to use as an excuse to do what most corporations were already doing: extract more work out of employees without getting them a pay raise What's the point of tools if they don't make people work better?
  - spwa4 1y ago
    > What's the point of tools if they don't make people work better? You just covered exactly that.

klipklop 1y ago

Number of people I know that used Duolingo successfully to be fluent in a new language: 0 Number of people I expect to meet in the future that used "AI first" Duolingo that successfully became fluent in a new language: 0 They don't even really have a functional product to begin with. Meaning that it can take the average person and help them competently speak a new language in a reasonable time frame. Vibe coding I guess can't make it any worse....

poisonarena 1y ago
I am fluent in spanish, and duolingo was really helpful at the beginner stage. When I was beginning to learn. I think between living in mexico (total immersion), consuming spanish media only, and about an hour of duolingo every night it was a tremendous boon. Mostly for learning to spell/remember gender nouns, and learning vocabulary.. I have tried other apps but the gamification also helps. I have now been speaking spanish for 9 years and have no use for duolingo when it comes to spanish, but I always recommend it as a resource to level up when you are a beginner.
pacomerh 1y ago
It's a game. Think of DuoLingo as a fun introduction, a springboard for serious language learning. People I know who use it have fun, but by no means are advanced in whatever language their learning.
dustincoates 1y ago
I get that it's popular to slag on Duolingo, especially in language-learning communities, but Duolingo is great for getting people started. I'm fluent in French and immigrated here about a decade ago, and I wouldn't have done that if not for Duolingo. It didn't get me anywhere close to fluent itself (Assimil was the single best resource, but no one resource can you get you to fluent), but it got me started and it got me committed. For that, I'm grateful.
- Larrikin 1y ago
  This comment dips into the uncanny valley or sadly plant. It's possible 10 years ago it did help you but there's nothing about the current product that would have.

Larrikin 1y ago

As someone who waffles back and forth between how conversational I am based on the topic and how much I've studied recently, this comes as no surprise. Nothing about Duolingo gives the impression they actually want you to learn the language. It presents itself as an easy way to start, but if you are more than a single undergrad class into the language and have used any outside resources, it's an obvious waste of time. Everything on the platform is just a slower form of the most basic note cards. Anki does everything the platform does faster. Anki isn't suitable for all task but Duolingo takes the basic note card and makes you learn at a slower pace.

theshrike79 1y ago
It's gamified Anki with social pressure. If finding proper Anki decks for languages wasn't such a massive pain in the ass (Along with navigating the weird 30€ mobile apps for it, are they official, are they not? Can a free alternative do the same?), people would use Anki a lot more. With Duolingo you can just install, launch, pick a language and get going.
- xdfgh1112 1y ago
  Anki is literally free on android. I made my own deck but there are plenty to go around. People spend so much energy making excuses for not learning a language that could be spent on... Just fucking getting on with it!
  - theshrike79 1y ago
    I don’t have the time to “make my own deck”. The UI for Anki is janky at best. I seriously tried making a deck for my kid for math and holy shit it was a chore and a half. The same with trying to find a deck for a specific language, no luck there. For iOS there are about a dozen “Anki” apps? One for 30€, the rest have some kind of in-app purchases. I’ll rather pay for Duolingo
    - malicka 1y ago
      The 24€ one is the official one: > AnkiMobile is the official iOS app and all purchases help fund Anki's development.[1] You could always use the web UI in your phone browser, Ankiweb[2], which is very kindly hosted for free by the developers. You could also write your cards as CSV, HTML, or really any format you want and import them, if the interface isn’t to your liking. Shoot, you can even use an Emacs package[3] if you want to. [1] https://apps.ankiweb.net/ https://apps.ankiweb.net/ [2] https://ankiweb.net/ https://ankiweb.net/ [3] https://github.com/eyeinsky/org-anki https://github.com/eyeinsky/org-anki

qalmakka 1y ago

I don't know, AI seems quite antithetical to what Duolingo supposedly stands for. AI raison d'etre is to allow people to do stuff they cannot do themselves or replace human skill with automated processes. Duolingo literally sells language courses, in a world where translation jobs are getting less and less necessary thanks to AI being especially great at translating stuff. Also "AI first" is BS, until AI has a 100% accuracy it is only useful as long as there are still competent people around that are able to understand what the AI does. A level of competence that gets harder and harder to get in a world where AI assistants allow you to get by by just pressing enter and producing poor quality slop. Companies and management want to _replace_ human labour because just they don't understand that AI works best _alongside_ people. This doesn't surprise me; one of the worst problems in IT right now is that IT is both pervasive and extraordinarily sector-specific. Capital is in the hands of people that not only don't understand how IT and computers work in detail, but don't even understand how little they understand in the first place

nope1000 1y ago

If people wanted that, they could just ask an LLM to be their language coach. The big issue is that with a foreign language, you cannot really verify that anything the model gives you is correct. And with how LLMs work, the wrong answers will look very convincing. I don't think that's a good idea.

trollbridge 1y ago
This is begging the question a bit, but yep. We all have access to LLMs, so why do we need a middleman like DuoLingo taking the output of an LLM and cluttering it up with irrelevant ads?

SirensOfTitan 1y ago

Right, so if the productivity gains were so blindingly obvious and immediate for everyone, mandates wouldn't be needed. These companies tried to quantify the productivity impact of work from home, so it's utterly bewildering to me that they would push these tool-use mandates without actually quantifying the impact LLM tools have on productivity. If it were just 'getting familiar' with AI tools to help define an AI-driven product mindset, I'd expect these CEOs to have more than a naive perception of the tools and their limitations. I honestly wonder where these mandates started--part of me feels like this is the nascent stage of a VC panic that their AI investment strategy might not work out.

n_ary 1y ago
I think, we need to step back a little in these discussions. We need to ask, what productivity gains are we hoping to find? In any knowledge or specialised work, operating a tool faster does not give great results, rather raises the risk of error and quality decline. Did duolingo once face existential threat because they failed to produce specific feature sometime? Did one of their feature suffer and cause user loss because it took more time for an engineer to write the actual code? Additionally, beyond formatting and obvious logical errors, every new code should in theory need some human review, which means more automated code means longer review. Assuming code is now produce at 2x, it also balances out that review will now take 2x. Additionally review is much more mentally taxing than putting out one’s thought into code, so risk of bugs and security holes also increases in the long term. While Software devs cost money, the job involves thinking, and that means it can’t be compared to factory work where someone is standing at next step to simply drill a screw in spotX and the next person will simply put on a cover. Despite years of effort, the attempt to make the process mirror factory floor(did anyone notice the open floor parallel to factory floors?) it failed. While many hate to see it this way, just like a surgeon will take his time to perform a brain/heart/tumor surgery, a SWE will do thinking, planning, coding and reviews. Giving a surgeon an autonomous bot that can spread the incision area faster or perform the incision faster does not mean productivity gain, it just means the doctor still needs to plan where to make the incision, how much to spread, what to chop off, what to avoid.
corytheboyd 1y ago

dang 1y ago

Related ongoing thread: LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43829035 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43829035 - April 2025 (290 comments)

xdfgh1112 1y ago

Do most people using Duolingo have anything to show for it? It's a time wasting online casino app dressed up with intellectual vibes. Not surprising that a spiritually dead company has spiritually dead values.

n_ary 1y ago

In another news, I intend to uninstall duolingo effective immediately and actually in an effort to support human-first businesses and enroll into a real language course class where I get to talk to real human beings with same goal and have actual exams and people trained in teaching particular language. For me, Duolingo(uber for Anki flash cards of preliminary words for a 3 day tourist in a new country) was always an odd product. It is very popular among people because they can immediately learn how to say hi/hello, thanks, please in new language but after that, it is akin to learning to swim by reading different tips and tricks, without actually ever touching water or doing the act.

stevage 1y ago
I found it unusable due to the overbearing gamification when I just wanted to learn a language.
- martinky24 1y ago
  The gamification is the #1 reason I uninstalled it within a few days.
- randycupertino 1y ago
  I stopped enjoying Duolingo when they took away the tree and made it a singular route on the path. I used to like jumping around on the tree in a more flexible fashion whereas the path feels so boring and forced.
  - GardenLetter27 1y ago
    And all the other apps copy them :( Like HelloChinese (new course), LingoDeer, SuperChinese, etc.
- billy99k 1y ago
  I like the gamification aspect. It keeps me using it daily.
amunozo 1y ago

nextworddev 1y ago

Not a whole lot stopping Duolingo to be replaced entirely by a thousand ChatGPt wrappers

gs17 1y ago

It's pretty funny reading https://www.quora.com/What-made-Luis-Von-Ahn-start-Duolingo/answer/Luis-Von-Ahn https://www.quora.com/What-made-Luis-Von-Ahn-start-Duolingo/... now: > So, the largest part of the market was not being addressed because there was no great way to make money from them. Most people who wanted to learn a language couldn't really afford the best ways of doing it. We wanted to have a way to teach people languages for free. But not just free. > We wanted to have the best quality of language education, and offer it for free. Modern Duolingo feels like neither half of that sentence.

pedalpete 1y ago

I shouldn't be surprised by the number of comments of people saying "I'm going to uninstall Duolingo immediately", but I am. AI is increasing our productivity just as the loom did back in the early 1800s. So are HN members now the luddites? We're both the developers and the destroyers? Why don't we all just go back to coding on punch cards if we're concerned improved productivity will take our jobs? We need to look at what we're doing, and what we will be doing in the next 10 or 20 years. Do we know what that will be? No. But should we get out the pitch forks when a company says "we're going to do more with less people because new technology allows us to do that"?

n_ary 1y ago
You are misreading. The declaration effectively does NOT quantify or prove any productivity gain. It simply alludes to a possibility by forcing to adapt a new tool which is frequently sold as productivity gain. There is no real consensus or mass scale data except businesses with executives heavily invested in the AI adjacent stocks or prefer to be called visionaries like how SAP or Adobe got lucky by moving into cloud and subscription model purely by accidentally following random hype. Also in most software dev task, writing code is rarely if ever the bottleneck, it is the thinking, endless scrum bullcrap, management alignment, architects being too obtuse to not sign off on simpler solutions to protect their prestige, not filling empty roles, pushing teams to extreme and then suddenly deciding to throw away and start something brand new while asking why can’t the thrown away solution be adapted for the new thing or simply consulting/contracting firms intentionally prolonging the project to milk maximum billable hours. I have actually read the entire screenshot in that tweet and to me it read 50% as non technical executive pitched by some AI vendor about how cool their tools are and 50% of clueless people finding non existent nails for their new hammer. AI has benefits, it may give productivity gains, specially if you are sweat shops churning out customization of same ERP or wordpress theme. Just repeating productivity gain, coding landscape will change, life will be different 500 times daily because the seller of LLM(calling them the AI wholesale is deceptive, they are subset) wants you to do that, does not magically make those true. The whole trend is sickening and it needs to die. Replacing SWE is fine, but if SWE can be replaced, the justification can be used to replace crucial things like doctors, lawyers, auditors and lots of other professionals which will kill us all.

boh 1y ago

"AI first" has the makings of an Amazon Go situation. You theoretically shed labor spend by using technology solutions but in practice have low-paying workers do most of the actual work. "AI first" just seems like a dog-whistle for "we're struggling to figure out how to grow so we're going to cut labor and make it seem like innovation".

actuallyalys 1y ago

> “It helps us get closer to our mission. To teach well, we need to create a massive amount of content, and doing that manually doesn’t scale. One of the best decisions we made recently was replacing a slow, manual content creation process with one powered by AI. Without AI, it would take us decades to scale our content to more learners. We owe it to our learners to get them this content ASAP.” It’s hard to fathom why this would be the case. Isn’t creating learning materials mostly an upfront task? Obviously you want to update your materials and fix mistakes. And perhaps you sometimes have a new idea that necessitates an update or rewriting things. But creating lesson materials honestly seems like it would scale very well. I think about reading language learning blogs and forums and people would sometimes recommend favorite resources that were from decades ago. I’m sure something was lost in them not being totally up to date but honestly, persistence is way more important than currency, let alone “having a massive amount of content.”

omneity 1y ago
You are right, it doesn’t make sense. If that was a real reason then why not augment their current staff with AI tools to “scale content to more learners” and still have a sense of quality and human touch. Encrappification at play.
- babyent 1y ago
  Revenue is down… We need to cut costs… doesn’t sound cool.
vaidhy 1y ago
You are missing a key point.. What is duolingo's success measured on? Not on how well their customers learn (they have already paid at this point).. but how much content is there (This number directly correlates to the signups). I am sure there are numbers around the subscribers vs regular content consumers and that ratio is tiny. For a lot of these kind of apps, quantity is the quality in itself.
- actuallyalys 1y ago

omneity 1y ago

I already found Duolingo quite bad, struggling to make it past the repetitive and often not-so-sensical question/answers, but this finally proves it’s not for me.

iamleppert 1y ago

I hope they can replace their customers with AI next, because that’s the only way a business like Duolingo is going to survive. My prediction is it’s gone in the next 18 months. A policy change like this is designed to have a thin veil of innovation (especially to an unsavy board) but if you read between the lines this is some executive’s wild idea to shake things up because they are completely and totally desperate and really don’t know what to do.

wolvesechoes 1y ago
"I hope they can replace their customers with AI next" But that is the final stage - AI producing digital content, AI consuming digital content, AI writing code, AI reviewing this code, AI arguing with AI on social media. No human needed, only numbers growing.

spunker540 1y ago

A lot of naysayers here, and I get it’s more about the tactics and messaging more than anything else— but in defense of Duolingo (I’m not a user): There is a good possibility that in 5 years people have moved on from Duolingo because new ai tutoring apps that can perfectly tailor content to your level and offer unlimited speaking practice sessions, may surpass Duolingo’s “old-fashioned” offering—-the same way Duolingo jumped ahead of websites, which jumped ahead of CDs and cassette tapes, which jumped ahead of books.

jhanschoo 1y ago
This, responding in natively fluent speech and immersion and personalized correction, is what I hope Duo is saying by saying that they are going to rely on AI. Their current system just sets people up to fail at language acquisition.
xrdegen 1y ago
chatGPT voice app can already talk in languages Duolingo doesn't have and will never have on their old path. They obviously had to do this. It is already over for Duolingo. All we really need is some kind of Anki deck generator with audio and that plus the language model to have conversations with, it is over. They will look like a childish relic of the past.
- GardenLetter27 1y ago
  Grammar lessons are also critical, especially well spaced for when you need to learn them. Ironically Duolingo removed all of that in the simplification and gameification recently.

conartist6 1y ago

Uh huh and will the employees still feel cared about do you think or will they all feel one step away from being pushed off the cliff

dgimla20 1y ago

Duolingo is an awful language learning tool (primary tool or only tool). Here is a Duolingo game. Translate the following into English: jvgug5 g54g 4g g45g ! g54 43 43r pgd0f Here are the words you need to drag and drop into order: fish to day cat eat My every eat likes Do 10 of these every day and you'll be fluent when you hit a 1000+ day streak. Do a lot of these to do more of them than other people on the leaderboard to see your name next to "1." with an icon of a trophy.

guywithahat 1y ago

I mean this seems reasonable, but the AI advisory board is likely to get in the way of actual innovation. They'll probably limit what models you can use for nonsense political reasons, and it'll just be another set of signatures you need to get to purchase an AI tool. I think there is a decent amount of logic to this though.

smlavine 1y ago

If Duolingo wants to be an "AI-First" company, then what's stopping all of us from being an "AI-First" society and just using Google Translate all the time? This contradicts the whole thesis statement of their company -- that it is worth time and effort to collaborate and learn with others, even when a machine can make it easier.

endofreach 1y ago

Just be thankful for all the companies destroying their "products" in favour of AI. They show that they won't be worth it in the future. A lot of companies will go away, and it won't be the ones "missing out" on "AI"... most of them will be the ones who cripple their product for some pseudo hype. It just shows they have no idea what to do, so just squeeze "AI" in... there are too many SaaS out there anyway.

teekay 1y ago

500 days on Duolingo and it has felt like it was produced by ChatGPT 3.5 this entire time. 500 days of learning various bits & pieces and not being able to have a simple conversation - but I could probably say "There is a monkey in his backpack" if pressed hard! I used to hate learning from actual textbooks as the conversations felt "dumb" or "forced" but that dumbing down as at least justified by having to progress from zero. Duolingo doesn't feel "plain dumb" but "weird dumb". So yeah, if they replace their contractors (who must've used the cheapest models) with O3 or o4-mini-high or whatever, it should be an improvement!

billy99k 1y ago

I feel like some of these changes already happened. I've been using it for 3+ years now and my listening practice over the last couple of weeks changed from words that I recognized, to a completely new set of words/sentences at twice the speed. The voices also sound like they are AI generated.