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

459 points by _p2zi 1y ago

k__ 1y ago
I switched to Busuu. It's very similar to Duolingo, but quite cheaper and has videos and certificates.
- leeoniya 1y ago
  well if it has certificates! <take my money meme>
  - manquer 1y ago
    You joke, but certification is important for some jobs, university admissions and visa applications in many countries. For example Cambridge has a big program for English which tons of universities in the english speaking world use for admissions of foreign students I don’t know if Busuu certificates are accepted anywhere major yet but it is not a bad idea, not every major language has standardized tests and rating systems like CEFR, there is room for new players especially in non European languages
i80and 1y ago
I was happily paying for Duolingo Super, despite being unconfident in its pedagogy, until they announced they were replacing their human curriculum writers. Dropped it instantly. I get the bargain-basement cost-cutting appeal from a (bad) CEO's perspective, but if I'm paying actual money for a service, I want said money going to humans.
- owebmaster 1y ago
  If cutting costs using AI was really that good for business, companies would be using it as a competitive advantage, not advertising everywhere.
- cosmic_cheese 1y ago
  The value proposition gets even more dicey if the target language is one with a sizable online learning community. Those are churning out more tools and instructional content every day, most of which are made freely available, and this content has the benefit of not only being made by humans but also by people who are passionate about the language who care about the small details. These communities are much quicker to embrace experimental learning methods, too, and so generally the stuff that doesn’t work gets filtered out in short order. And as others in these comments note, if one wants to use an LLM as a language tutor, you can do that for less than what Duolingo is charging while also getting the benefit of being able to tune it to your exact needs instead of being stuck with whatever Duolingo decided is best.
- spaceywilly 1y ago
  Not to mention, at that point they are essentially just serving as the middle man between you and a LLM. Instead of paying for Duolingo to ask an LLM to generate a bunch of Spanish phrases for you, you can pay for the LLM and do that yourself plus a lot more. I’m not sure Duolingo has a solid understanding of why they exist as a business.
godzillabrennus 1y ago
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.
- 90s_dev 1y ago
  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?
  - adocomplete 1y ago
    It's not stinginess, it's value. 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. I feel like so many AI products these days won't be around a few years from now once more people find out that all their doing is providing a slightly different UI to what you can get directly from OAI, Anthropic, Google for cheaper and better and more tailored to you.
    - whyowhy3484939 1y ago
      LLMs cannot "teach you a language". They make for cool demos to show off. They can perhaps be a building block of a proper language learning experience. Then again, the only languages I actually learned - besides my mother tongue - to the point of being able to do things were English and Latin and both were very much acquired offline. I have plenty of experience with language learning apps and I'm not convinced tech is the solution or even part of the solution.
      - adocomplete 1y ago
        I think the best way to learn a language is offline through actual human interaction. I've used Duolingo in the past (and other apps) and quickly lost interest, it's a fun app, but I feel like you don't learn from it. If I had to learn a new language today, I'm confident I could make good progress with GPT or Gemini, but tailoring it to how I learn.
cedws 1y ago
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- _9ptr 1y ago
  His wikipedia page suggests otherwise. Raised by a single mother in Guatemala. It doesn't mention why he has a german noble name though. But these don't really allow assumptions about the individual wealth anymore.
  - cedws 1y ago
    He went to private school, which he himself calls a “great privilege” according to his Wikipedia page. He was bought a C64 as a child. How is that not privileged? Did you even read it?
- deleted 1y ago
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- deleted 1y ago
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- EA-3167 1y ago
  ...He was born to a middle-class, single mother in Guatemala. Sometimes just reading someone's name doesn't give you the information you're looking for. The only real evidence of "privilege" in his upbringing was the chance to attend The American School of Guatemala and his mother being a doctor.
- deleted 1y ago
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- onionisafruit 1y ago
  I take issue with assuming that based on his name alone. Is there a wealthy von Ahn family I’m not aware of? If there is, having that name doesn’t mean you are part of that family.
  - cedws 1y ago
techpineapple 1y ago
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.
- charcircuit 1y ago
  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.
  - wjholden 1y ago
    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.
  - highstep 1y ago
    but Social media companies suppress human curation in favor of their algorithmic recommendations; while human curation doesn't scale as a business model, it still competes for attention—and is thus marginalized.
retnuhllort 1y ago
Can someone explain the point of this article? How does any of this matter unless 1. customers stop using this app or 2. all employees quit. Neither one is happening, especially the one where customers leave, because customers are not using this app as a form of charity to fund salaries of contractors.
- sandspar 1y ago
  There's a group of news readers who dislike CEO's and dislike AI. Many of these people have also heard of Duolingo. "CEO of [company you've heard of] makes an AI mistake" is a surefire way to get clicks.
  - zugi 1y ago
    That seems about right. Hacker News was once a more reasonable alternative to reddit, but these days sometimes it's reasonable, and sometimes it displays the same hive-mind reactions, depending on the thread. The app is absolutely gamified, but I've never paid them a dollar, waste about 1.5 minutes a day ignoring ads, and in exchange for nothing I get moderately useful foreign language learning. The gamification keeps me at it, where past study approaches eventually petered out. The use of AI in this and other tools is inevitable. The CEO certainly oversold it in his initial announcement, but the weird reaction of people stopping using the app because Due Lingo is going "AI first" seems inconsistent. Are people going to stop using Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Nvidia because they're all-in on AI too?
    - regularjack 1y ago
      It is not at all surprising to me that humans care about other humans. Only a minority of humans are sociopaths, fortunately.
    - sandspar 1y ago
      Note that this reasonable comment about HackerNews groupthink has been downvoted to grey.
- 1y ago
amsilprotag 1y ago
I stopped using duolingo regularly about a month ago. It's wonderful that Luis von Ahn says in interviews that he tries to prevent teams from cluttering the app, but it seems like he lost the battle. You can get 10+ pop-ups after a lesson. The friend feed is cluttered with meaningless achievements. The web app is tolerable, but the phone experience is miserable. But if you're behind a computer and keyboard, there are much more effective ways to learn. Busuu is a much warmer product on either device, with videos of native-language speakers to help with listening. Duolingo has scaling and distribution. It makes no sense to scrimp for pennies on a product (e.g. English learning Spanish) that has millions of daily users. The AI radio lessons feel alienating and demoralizing compared to voice-acted stories, and the quality control is much worse.
- Aurornis 1y ago
  > It's wonderful that Luis von Ahn says in interviews that he tries to prevent teams from cluttering the app, but it seems like he lost the battle. This is classic PR spin. Do one thing, publicly say you’re not doing it. Try to get the benefit of good intentions while doing the opposite. The CEO doesn’t lose any battles with the product managers. He could reverse the changes in a matter of days by calling a meeting or sending an email. What’s actually happening here is they Product Managers are responding to what gets rewarded at the company, which ultimately comes from the CEO.
  - amsilprotag 1y ago
    A CEO has the power to do anything, but employees have the power to collectively, quietly sandbag if they don't like the leadership. I think the AI effort led to a broad disillusionment, causing an unwillingness to put extra effort into their work. Across the company, everyone starts to take the path of least resistance. The CEO senses his influence waning and becomes more accommodating to avoid further morale death spiral. So situations can arise where a CEO would like a cleaner product (no one likes to ship garbage), but has lost the political capital to make it happen.
    - Aurornis 1y ago
Apreche 1y ago
> “I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen with AI, but I do know it’s going to fundamentally change the way we work, and we have to get ahead of it,” admits the man who just a few weeks ago crowed about how vital AI was to Duolingo’s business. > “AI is creating uncertainty for all of us, and we can respond to this with fear or curiosity. I’ve always encouraged our team to embrace new technology (that’s why we originally built for mobile instead of desktop), and we are taking that same approach with AI. By understanding the capabilities and limitations of AI now, we can stay ahead of it and remain in control of our own product and our mission,” writes von Ahn. We don’t know what is going to happen, but we can plainly see what has already happened. The overwhelming majority of it has been absolute garbage. We’re not responding with fear or curiosity. We are responding with disdain. To be fair, language translation is one of the use cases that are an acceptable and legitimate use of LLMs, but they still are not all the way there yet. If I were Duolingo CEO, I would have people doing R&D with them, but I would not be using it at all in any way whatsoever on any production product. Publicly, in terms of marketing, I would shit all over them. I would make myself out to be the non-evil non-AI tech CEO. Even if the R&D is a success and I later have to eat crow, that’s fine. I’m a wealthy CEO, who cares? As for me using Duolingo, I think I’m going to switch to live human tutoring over video and/or in-person.
lolinder 1y ago
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 article from a few years ago [0]. It's a piece by Duolingo's CPO (who was a former Zynga employee) where he discusses at length how Duolingo started using streaks and other gamification techniques to optimize their numbers. He has a lot to say about manipulating users into spending more time with them, but in the entire piece he barely even gives a token nod to the supposed mission of the company to help people learn. The date he cites for the beginning of their efforts to optimize numbers pretty closely correlates to my sense for when my wife began to complain about Duolingo feeling more and more manipulative and less and less useful. This past month they finally jumped the shark and she decided to quit after 6+ years. The subsequent announcement that they'd be using AI to churn out even more lackluster content gave us a good laugh but was hardly surprising: they'd given up on prioritizing learning a long while ago. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34977435 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34977435
- smallnix 1y ago
  I think it's about expectations, for me it's my favorite mobile game with a minor learning side effect.
- baq 1y ago
  I've got a 3 year streak and gamification was obvious to me on day 2. Some of their feature flag experiments are very in your face, too. Still, 3 minutes per day is just about my tempo. I don't care about literally anything in there except the learning part and consistently doing only one lesson per day makes them very nice and polite most of the time - I feel like I'm in the 'beg-these-for-money' instead of 'milk-them-dry' cohort. (Or maybe I'm in the permanent 'lets-be-nice-for-them' long running experiment?)
- dbbk 1y ago
  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
Aurornis 1y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43827978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43827978 The leaked AI memo had phrases like “productivity expectations will rise” and off comments about how they now know that LLMs “work better with context”. It felt like the Duolingo CEO saw the trend of companies embracing AI coding tools and tried to come up with a way of being the on of the most extreme thought leaders in going “AI first”, without really understanding anything beyond surface level.
zzzeek 1y ago
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/ 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.
- sandinmyjoints 1y ago
  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.
  - Zmajche 1y ago
    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.
    - sandinmyjoints 1y ago
      I'll pass this along! Since you mentioned installing, I'm assuming this was an app, not web. Android or iOS?
      - Zmajche 1y ago
        Android App via PlayStore...
  - zzzeek 1y ago
    I will try it. From my other comments you can gather I'm a sad lifelong monolinguist despite having a terrific Spanish foundation in middle school, and I can hardly imagine ever being conversational. But it's only been a week
NKosmatos 1y ago
My favorite punch line from the post "...serves to highlight just how out of touch the wealthy are with regular people..."
claytongulick 1y ago
It feels to me like business culture is on the peak "hill of stupidity" of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Collectively, businesses haven't yet realized what many developers have - the significant hidden costs with AI coding. We went through this with offshoring as well.
deleted 1y ago
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vitro 1y ago
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 https://www.latudio.com [1] https://www.latudio.com/whats-inside https://www.latudio.com/whats-inside
BrandiATMuhkuh 1y ago
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-92dc3c7a882b https://ir.canterbury.ac.nz/items/7da0e989-aa9f-4b92-86bd-92...
- ema 1y ago
  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.
whyowhy3484939 1y ago
Ah, Duolingo. What lengths people go just to avoid reading a book and talking to people. All this tech and I wonder how many people are now fluent in multiple languages compared to say a few decades ago. This is not academic. All signs are saying we are heading in the wrong direction[1] and more tech ain't going to solve shit. Literacy rates and numerical abilities are going down the drain faster than you can say "Claude". I suggest we really, really get our acts together and stop trusting tech to solve our non-tech problems.[2] “It is actually hard to imagine that every third person you meet on the street has difficulties reading even simple things.” [3] [1] https://www.oecd.org/en/about/news/press-releases/2024/12/adult-skills-in-literacy-and-numeracy-declining-or-stagnating-in-most-oecd-countries.html https://www.oecd.org/en/about/news/press-releases/2024/12/ad... [2] https://archive.is/zCxBl https://archive.is/zCxBl (The Atlantic: the elite college students who can't read books) [3] https://archive.is/4k96F#selection-1989.261-1989.387 https://archive.is/4k96F#selection-1989.261-1989.387 (Financial Times: are we becoming a post-literate society?)
- zzzeek 1y ago
  > What lengths people go just to avoid reading a book and talking to people. odd take, do you have the same negative sentiment for the entire field of language instruction? introductory German class at a local college? 7th grade French ? things like that?
  - whyowhy3484939 1y ago
    What introductory German class does not use books and does not talk to people?
    - zzzeek 1y ago
      oh, so you only mean like the gamified nature of duolingo? Lots of language apps have lessons that are interactive versions of language books and they also include conversational practice with language models. Conversational practice with humans is not necessarily easily available nor is it that appropriate if you are just learning a language and can't have simple conversations yet. Babbel for example is pretty comparable to a traditional language class in how it's structured. It's pretty convenient that I can use it any time of day and as often as I want, from my car or whatever.
wilg 1y ago
I recently started using Duolingo and it seems pretty good.
j_timberlake 1y ago
They don't have a moat. They could have built one by turning the app into an actual game. Casuals love farming games, give them a farm where the crops grow by learning new words. Too late now though.
827a 1y ago
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.
colordrops 1y ago
Duolingo has gone to such shit after they've removed humanistic feature in the app such as the question discussion board and avatar photos. It's so dry and mechanistic now. It's ironic as the whole purpose of language learning is human connection.
latenightcoding 1y ago
It's crazy this app has barely changed in like a decade, they even went public but the learning experience is just worse
InTheArena 1y ago
Given the typo at the very start of the article (maybe it's a .za thing?) "Unfortunately the PR team may soon be replaced by AI as this latest statement has done anything but instil confidence in the firm’s users." it's worth pointing out that Grammarly would have caught that.
- brightbeige 1y ago
  Instil? https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/instil https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/instil > Australia, Ireland and UK standard spelling of instill. (And presumably South Africa as well)
bgwalter 1y ago
It is astonishing that a CMU professor can sink so low. Then again, he also invented reCaptcha. Of course, DuoLingo is superfluous. Watching movies in the target language with subtitles in you own language is more fun and has quicker results.
- exogeny 1y ago
  It's embarrassing. It's not Richard Grenell bad, but it's close.
InTheArena 1y ago
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.
- _se 1y ago
  [flagged]
- owebmaster 1y ago
  AI will change everything but the companies trying to adapt like Duolingo or Shopify are doing will become the new Yahoos and Nokias.
- przemub 1y ago
  People behave as if AI were going to eat the software. I, and many others, don’t believe that is going to happen.
  - BeetleB 1y ago
    I'm guessing you're a SW engineer. It doesn't matter what you think. It matters what high level managers/CEOs think.
    - dghlsakjg 1y ago
      In the short term, maybe. In the long term, actual results will tell us what parts of the process matter.
    - Thrymr 1y ago
      > I'm guessing you're a SW engineer. > It doesn't matter what you think. It matters what high level managers/CEOs think. In the short term, perhaps. In the longer term, it matters whether it actually works.
- pessimizer 1y ago
  It seems like a combination of 1) extreme denial of the possibility of change anywhere ever (which is standard middle-class anxiety - your extremely specialized skills have been devalued, and now you're poor), and 2) cynicism is safe because most things fail. Cynicism is even safer when a bunch of people are trying to sell you something, because most of them are going to be con-men. But I think the modern machine learning methods of the past few years are as important as the computer, and we're just starting the period between the computer and the transistor, during which time we're using vacuum tubes and giant iron rings to build them. When the AI-transistor comes along, it's going to be the engine of all human technological process for the next century. edit: if there's anything that AI is going to be really, really good at, very soon, it's going to be teaching people languages. I don't have a problem with Duolingo going to AI; it wasn't exactly great before. It's just a brand and cartoons, not a method. Being that it wasn't great before, though, I have no idea what qualifies Duolingo to come up with language-teaching AI. I don't think gamification skills transfer. If anything, they need to be furiously hiring extremely high level, extremely expensive AI people and second-language learning academics/linguists. Duolingo lost its purpose as an app when it figured out that creating a translation army was pointless, and it lost most of its usefulness when it froze, then deleted the forums. Now it's just a cloud of IP. They might as well start selling a soda pop.
leoc 1y ago
I've never had the pleasure of experiencing DuoLingo myself, but by all accounts it's an exceptionally time-inefficient way of learning a language. If the objective is to have fun playing a buzzy mobile game with the rest of the world then whatever, but if you actually want to make progress in a language you'd be much better advised to head over to something like Refold https://refold.la/ https://refold.la/ or Dreaming Spanish https://www.dreamingspanish.com/ https://www.dreamingspanish.com/ . Even if you simply must have a phone app which does everything for you, you'd probably do better with something like Busuu https://www.busuu.com https://www.busuu.com or Glossika https://ai.glossika.com/ https://ai.glossika.com/ . So the AI furore is a bit ironic: people profess to hate "bullshit jobs", but if anything is a bullshit job it's probably providing the manpower for a language-learning app which doesn't actually teach languages effectively. Replacing mechanical-Turk slop with AI slop probably is a genuine productivity gain unleashed by AI here, yes? OTOH a drop in subscriber numbers and total user-hours is probably a good thing too, so don't let any of this put you off from giving up on DuoLingo.
- Alex-Programs 1y ago
  The language-specific subreddits also have excellent advice.
  - leoc 1y ago
    The quality of advice on Reddit seems to be variable, unfortunately. Apparently https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese is full of people who've spent years doing Genki (https://genki3.japantimes.co.jp/en/ https://genki3.japantimes.co.jp/en/ , probably an even bigger sinkhole for money, time and enthusiasm than DuoLingo) with little to show for it who are determined to drag everyone else into the same crab-bucket, for instance. OTOH https://www.reddit.com/r/latin/ https://www.reddit.com/r/latin/ used to be very helpful.
    - sushid 1y ago
      What do you recommend?
varelse 1y ago
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eigenspace 1y ago
For me, the problem with Duolingo has always been that the content is just too lowest-common-denominator, and this will just bring it down even lower. I switched a while ago to Seedlang (https://www.seedlang.com/ https://www.seedlang.com/), and while it only supports French, German, and Spanish, I can at least say that the German course is everything I actually wanted from Duolingo. Every exercise involves a real video of a real German speaker speaking in German. You get to hear them at the same time as you see their face, which is not something you'd think is a big deal, but absolutely does make a big difference. When it's your turn to say a phrase, it records your voice and plays it back to you, rather than use some shitty model to try and guess if you spoke correctly. By listening to your own voice you can clearly hear when you're getting things right versus when you're getting things wrong. Early on, German speakers would often comment on how my accent was quite good for my level, and I think this is big part of that. IMO Duolingo's attempt to try and scale to every language as fast as possible just makes it a worse product than something 'artisanal' like Seedlang (though of course, if there's no artisanal resources, then Duolingo might have some value to offer)
- Archonical 1y ago
  I studied German for 3 years in university, dabbled in German duo-lingo, and completed all German courses on Memrise. I don't see how one can learn German fluently using Duolingo (or even Memrise, which I think is much better). It's great for vocabulary, but I think understanding the grammar requires understanding the theory which I didn't see when I used these applications.
  - tetris11 1y ago
    I did every German module on Duolingo in a 5-month preparation for moving to Germany for my job, and I got the coveted Golden Owl to prove my proficiency... ... only for me to get to Germany and realise very early on that I would need to do a basic A1 language course. The app was gibberish; the pronunciations were wrong, the genders were misleading, and the daily interactions they tried to drill in me were far from useful. The overinflated proficiency instilled in me by the app, made me genuinely believe I could interact easily with a German - a delusion I was quickly and painfully made aware of, much to my chagrin.
hiAndrewQuinn 1y ago
This might be a nice time for me to plug the FOSS software I've been quietly building over the last ~3 years for English speaking learners of Finnish specifically. I've recently collected them all onto a little landing page at https://finbug.xyz/ https://finbug.xyz/ . I run into other immigrants to this country semi-regularly now who say they've used at least one of these tools, most commonly the frequency deck or reverse-conjugator/decliner. It's been a surprisingly fruitful way to make professional connections here.
thenberlin 1y ago
If an LLM is what's going to teach me a new language, why would I ever pay some middleman $100-200 a year for an app wrapper? This guy doesn't seem to realize that embracing AI-first doesn't just put his employees on the chopping block, it actually suggests his whole company is unnecessary. This is what I don't think the "AI-first" business crowd understands -- in many cases, the moment you admit the humans in your organization can be wholesale replaced by AI, that's a sign it's possible your whole ass business case could be unnecessary LLM middleware.
- missedthecue 1y ago
  Literally millions of people already pay for LLM wrappers for all sorts of different products and services.
zombiwoof 1y ago
Welcome to the Scam Altman future hellscape
foxfired 1y ago
Slight tangent. I remember many jobs ago when our CEO went on a mobile-first campaign. I literally watched him talk about the type of innovations we were making to cater to our customers, while I was writing a regex to redirect mobile to m.example.com. Before the year was over, the campaign had switched to Big Data. We signed up for some big data services, the CEO talked to the media about it, but we never did anything with the service. The thing is, it worked. The company was sold for over a billion dollars. I've written about Duolingo being a game first before anything else. I still get the occasional email that "Exposes" me and asked me to retract the article. But for Duolingo's CEO, none of this matters because it's a PR stunt that either works or doesn't. And right now, it looks like it didn't work. But that's ok, because quantum is going to change the game.
ccppurcell 1y ago
It is my informed opinion as an educator, most recently in English as a second language, and as a language learner that duolingo is at best woefully old fashioned and at worst completely broken, pedagogically speaking. It's high time the owl fell from its high perch.
- pessimizer 1y ago
  > woefully old fashioned and at worst completely broken This is the part that I'm shocked people don't notice. A young high school teacher who keeps up with the literature is going to be miles ahead of Duolingo pedagogically. One of the reasons I'm bullish on AI in language learning is that you could do fully-reactive, individualized TPRS* with AI. You could even simulate other students. [*] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TPR_Storytelling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TPR_Storytelling
landl0rd 1y ago
For the most part consumers do stuff like this and then change their minds or forget about it. Boycotts like this rarely work. Don't overestimate the conscientiousness of the average consumer. Duolingo is still going to do this, and probably get worse, and users will continue to use it.
catigula 1y ago
The CEO of my company is the same person. Narcissism blinders on, "you can develop an entire application in minutes, we can fire our whole staff". Doesn't realize that if this was true he'd be fired as well. The entrepreneurial mind isn't responding well to the realities and risks of AI. It appears to be oil and water.
jgalt212 1y ago
I was not surprised when Klarna or Shoppify made these inane AI uber alles type statements to placate the investor class. Having followed and envied Louis for quite some time, I did fee very disappointed when he jumped into the deep end of the AI pool without looking.
bonif 1y ago
The Dildo of AI Rarely Arrives Lubed
9cb14c1ec0 1y ago
Kind of funny to watch the crazy AI hype group-think that probably originates in the CEO group-chats gradually evaporate as reality hits that AI is a useful tool instead of a be-all, end-all.
bayareapsycho 1y ago
Their PE ratio is 256. What really matters is convincing wall street to keep funneling money into their company stock So what he's doing makes a lot of sense. Have to keep the stock high and sell off before reality kicks in. All of this money floating around incentivizes this behavior
in_ab 1y ago
I fear AI will lead to inevitable decline in software quality. A lot of companies are going to try to replace humans with AI. And if the end result doesn't elicit backlash, more will follow. It may not fly in some domains, but a lot of people are already used to using buggy software.
einrealist 1y ago
Good times for ex-contractors of Duolingo to have AI help them build a honest competitor app. Just watched a video about Sears today and it reminded me how fast top dogs can fail.
djeastm 1y ago
I learned a foreign language as an adult, but the way I did it was by being an Army linguist who spent a year and a half in full-time training with native speakers, plus multiple re-trainings for the next five years. I have no idea how people are learning a language using an app for a few minutes a day.
- Barrin92 1y ago
  > I have no idea how people are learning a language using an app for a few minutes a day They don't but this is also not the point and seems to account for the frustrations expressed in the conversation. Before I decided to get serious about learning Japanese I spent a few months on Duolingo. It taught me hiragana, katakana, a few kanji, maybe 1k words but obviously I couldn't really speak Japanese. But I also didn't expect to, I looked at it as "it's better than wasting another 10 minutes on twitter". And for that it worked perfectly well, honestly better than I thought.
nchmy 1y ago
Genuine question: If Duolingo was being started today by a solo developer, and they essentially just created some sort of wrapper over [insert LLM] to be a language tutor, would there be outrage? I suspect not. So, this seems to be more about getting rid of workers than it is about AI. Would people use it? Probably, and I think it would VERY well - at least in comparison to current options. ChatGPT is a fantastic Spanish tutor (though I'm largely self-taught, through immersion). So, something that actually has some sort of structured curriculum and the LLM assesses your progress, gives guidance, explains why things are the way they are and how they compare (eg particular verb tenses and conjugations, order of words/syntax etc...), could surely be enormously useful. It probably wouldnt even be that hard to open-source some system prompts for a curriculum...
ark296 1y ago
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.
jwilber 1y ago
I’ve worked in AI for years (and still do!), but something about the callousness of his comments, the almost celebratory replacement of human labor, immediately made me delete Duolingo. I was a daily user and have switched over to Pimsleur.
dinkumthinkum 1y ago
Duolingo has seemed like a very sketchy app to me for a long time. I have used and recommended it when it first came out. However, when I used it more seriously, I realized he Duolingo is nearly pointless. It is pretty terrible way to fool yourself into thinking you are learning a language. It is at best a way to kind of get familiar with the language but it is not a primary or secondary resource, perhaps more of a fifth or sixth resource and only then more as a break. I think you can just spend a lot of time on Duolingo, which they want, accomplishes nothing at all other than accumulating their useless badges. If they want to go “AI first,” I invite to consider just shutting down their business altogether and tell people to just use ChatGPT for learning, or better yet, with their vision of the future, just tell people not yo bother learning another language at all.
lawrenceyan 1y ago
As long as you recognize what Duolingo "actually is" you'll understand why it's worth what it is today. Not everything is always surface level.
bfrog 1y ago
so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should Dr Ian Malcolm was spot on except it wasn’t Dinosaurs that turned out to be the idiotic creation instead it’s massively wasteful chatbots
username135 1y ago
The app has gone down hill but i still use it because i cant find any decent Irish programs elsewhere. I dont mind the gamification but can see why its annoying. Once I fond a suitable replacement, i will cancel my membership. I will say this, ive learned quite a lot of the language simply through the app. I am highly motivated though.
- mzs 1y ago
  Watch these over and over for a month: https://youtu.be/496H4TdJIiw https://youtu.be/496H4TdJIiw
  - username135 1y ago
    Thanks!
tonyhart7 1y ago
I think about this point, Company that stick to their human workflow would gain brand recognition from customer instead especially over service that selling service about human interaction (translation, language, communication etc)
crakhamster01 1y ago
Is any of this pushback having a material impact on the company? It seems like their stock is still hovering around all-time highs.
nickfromseattle 1y ago
My conversations with non-tech friends and family indicates non-tech people don't like AI because of the perception that it will negatively impact their jobs / career, and ability to pay bills. This makes sense to me. 54% of Americans have below a 6th grade reading level, these folks will not be orchestrating AI agents, they will be replaced by AI agents.
Samyuktha_d 1y ago
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459 points by _p2zi 1y ago

k__ 1y ago

I switched to Busuu. It's very similar to Duolingo, but quite cheaper and has videos and certificates.

leeoniya 1y ago
well if it has certificates! <take my money meme>
- manquer 1y ago
  You joke, but certification is important for some jobs, university admissions and visa applications in many countries. For example Cambridge has a big program for English which tons of universities in the english speaking world use for admissions of foreign students I don’t know if Busuu certificates are accepted anywhere major yet but it is not a bad idea, not every major language has standardized tests and rating systems like CEFR, there is room for new players especially in non European languages

i80and 1y ago

I was happily paying for Duolingo Super, despite being unconfident in its pedagogy, until they announced they were replacing their human curriculum writers. Dropped it instantly. I get the bargain-basement cost-cutting appeal from a (bad) CEO's perspective, but if I'm paying actual money for a service, I want said money going to humans.

owebmaster 1y ago
If cutting costs using AI was really that good for business, companies would be using it as a competitive advantage, not advertising everywhere.
cosmic_cheese 1y ago
The value proposition gets even more dicey if the target language is one with a sizable online learning community. Those are churning out more tools and instructional content every day, most of which are made freely available, and this content has the benefit of not only being made by humans but also by people who are passionate about the language who care about the small details. These communities are much quicker to embrace experimental learning methods, too, and so generally the stuff that doesn’t work gets filtered out in short order. And as others in these comments note, if one wants to use an LLM as a language tutor, you can do that for less than what Duolingo is charging while also getting the benefit of being able to tune it to your exact needs instead of being stuck with whatever Duolingo decided is best.
spaceywilly 1y ago
Not to mention, at that point they are essentially just serving as the middle man between you and a LLM. Instead of paying for Duolingo to ask an LLM to generate a bunch of Spanish phrases for you, you can pay for the LLM and do that yourself plus a lot more. I’m not sure Duolingo has a solid understanding of why they exist as a business.

godzillabrennus 1y ago

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.

90s_dev 1y ago
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?
- adocomplete 1y ago
  It's not stinginess, it's value. 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. I feel like so many AI products these days won't be around a few years from now once more people find out that all their doing is providing a slightly different UI to what you can get directly from OAI, Anthropic, Google for cheaper and better and more tailored to you.
  - whyowhy3484939 1y ago
    LLMs cannot "teach you a language". They make for cool demos to show off. They can perhaps be a building block of a proper language learning experience. Then again, the only languages I actually learned - besides my mother tongue - to the point of being able to do things were English and Latin and both were very much acquired offline. I have plenty of experience with language learning apps and I'm not convinced tech is the solution or even part of the solution.
    - adocomplete 1y ago
      I think the best way to learn a language is offline through actual human interaction. I've used Duolingo in the past (and other apps) and quickly lost interest, it's a fun app, but I feel like you don't learn from it. If I had to learn a new language today, I'm confident I could make good progress with GPT or Gemini, but tailoring it to how I learn.

cedws 1y ago

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_9ptr 1y ago
His wikipedia page suggests otherwise. Raised by a single mother in Guatemala. It doesn't mention why he has a german noble name though. But these don't really allow assumptions about the individual wealth anymore.
- cedws 1y ago
  He went to private school, which he himself calls a “great privilege” according to his Wikipedia page. He was bought a C64 as a child. How is that not privileged? Did you even read it?
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EA-3167 1y ago
...He was born to a middle-class, single mother in Guatemala. Sometimes just reading someone's name doesn't give you the information you're looking for. The only real evidence of "privilege" in his upbringing was the chance to attend The American School of Guatemala and his mother being a doctor.
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onionisafruit 1y ago
I take issue with assuming that based on his name alone. Is there a wealthy von Ahn family I’m not aware of? If there is, having that name doesn’t mean you are part of that family.
- cedws 1y ago

techpineapple 1y ago

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.

charcircuit 1y ago
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.
- wjholden 1y ago
  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.
- highstep 1y ago
  but Social media companies suppress human curation in favor of their algorithmic recommendations; while human curation doesn't scale as a business model, it still competes for attention—and is thus marginalized.

retnuhllort 1y ago

Can someone explain the point of this article? How does any of this matter unless 1. customers stop using this app or 2. all employees quit. Neither one is happening, especially the one where customers leave, because customers are not using this app as a form of charity to fund salaries of contractors.

sandspar 1y ago
There's a group of news readers who dislike CEO's and dislike AI. Many of these people have also heard of Duolingo. "CEO of [company you've heard of] makes an AI mistake" is a surefire way to get clicks.
- zugi 1y ago
  That seems about right. Hacker News was once a more reasonable alternative to reddit, but these days sometimes it's reasonable, and sometimes it displays the same hive-mind reactions, depending on the thread. The app is absolutely gamified, but I've never paid them a dollar, waste about 1.5 minutes a day ignoring ads, and in exchange for nothing I get moderately useful foreign language learning. The gamification keeps me at it, where past study approaches eventually petered out. The use of AI in this and other tools is inevitable. The CEO certainly oversold it in his initial announcement, but the weird reaction of people stopping using the app because Due Lingo is going "AI first" seems inconsistent. Are people going to stop using Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Nvidia because they're all-in on AI too?
  - regularjack 1y ago
    It is not at all surprising to me that humans care about other humans. Only a minority of humans are sociopaths, fortunately.
  - sandspar 1y ago
    Note that this reasonable comment about HackerNews groupthink has been downvoted to grey.
1y ago

amsilprotag 1y ago

I stopped using duolingo regularly about a month ago. It's wonderful that Luis von Ahn says in interviews that he tries to prevent teams from cluttering the app, but it seems like he lost the battle. You can get 10+ pop-ups after a lesson. The friend feed is cluttered with meaningless achievements. The web app is tolerable, but the phone experience is miserable. But if you're behind a computer and keyboard, there are much more effective ways to learn. Busuu is a much warmer product on either device, with videos of native-language speakers to help with listening. Duolingo has scaling and distribution. It makes no sense to scrimp for pennies on a product (e.g. English learning Spanish) that has millions of daily users. The AI radio lessons feel alienating and demoralizing compared to voice-acted stories, and the quality control is much worse.

Aurornis 1y ago
> It's wonderful that Luis von Ahn says in interviews that he tries to prevent teams from cluttering the app, but it seems like he lost the battle. This is classic PR spin. Do one thing, publicly say you’re not doing it. Try to get the benefit of good intentions while doing the opposite. The CEO doesn’t lose any battles with the product managers. He could reverse the changes in a matter of days by calling a meeting or sending an email. What’s actually happening here is they Product Managers are responding to what gets rewarded at the company, which ultimately comes from the CEO.
- amsilprotag 1y ago
  A CEO has the power to do anything, but employees have the power to collectively, quietly sandbag if they don't like the leadership. I think the AI effort led to a broad disillusionment, causing an unwillingness to put extra effort into their work. Across the company, everyone starts to take the path of least resistance. The CEO senses his influence waning and becomes more accommodating to avoid further morale death spiral. So situations can arise where a CEO would like a cleaner product (no one likes to ship garbage), but has lost the political capital to make it happen.
  - Aurornis 1y ago

Apreche 1y ago

> “I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen with AI, but I do know it’s going to fundamentally change the way we work, and we have to get ahead of it,” admits the man who just a few weeks ago crowed about how vital AI was to Duolingo’s business. > “AI is creating uncertainty for all of us, and we can respond to this with fear or curiosity. I’ve always encouraged our team to embrace new technology (that’s why we originally built for mobile instead of desktop), and we are taking that same approach with AI. By understanding the capabilities and limitations of AI now, we can stay ahead of it and remain in control of our own product and our mission,” writes von Ahn. We don’t know what is going to happen, but we can plainly see what has already happened. The overwhelming majority of it has been absolute garbage. We’re not responding with fear or curiosity. We are responding with disdain. To be fair, language translation is one of the use cases that are an acceptable and legitimate use of LLMs, but they still are not all the way there yet. If I were Duolingo CEO, I would have people doing R&D with them, but I would not be using it at all in any way whatsoever on any production product. Publicly, in terms of marketing, I would shit all over them. I would make myself out to be the non-evil non-AI tech CEO. Even if the R&D is a success and I later have to eat crow, that’s fine. I’m a wealthy CEO, who cares? As for me using Duolingo, I think I’m going to switch to live human tutoring over video and/or in-person.

lolinder 1y ago

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 article from a few years ago [0]. It's a piece by Duolingo's CPO (who was a former Zynga employee) where he discusses at length how Duolingo started using streaks and other gamification techniques to optimize their numbers. He has a lot to say about manipulating users into spending more time with them, but in the entire piece he barely even gives a token nod to the supposed mission of the company to help people learn. The date he cites for the beginning of their efforts to optimize numbers pretty closely correlates to my sense for when my wife began to complain about Duolingo feeling more and more manipulative and less and less useful. This past month they finally jumped the shark and she decided to quit after 6+ years. The subsequent announcement that they'd be using AI to churn out even more lackluster content gave us a good laugh but was hardly surprising: they'd given up on prioritizing learning a long while ago. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34977435 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34977435

smallnix 1y ago
I think it's about expectations, for me it's my favorite mobile game with a minor learning side effect.
baq 1y ago
I've got a 3 year streak and gamification was obvious to me on day 2. Some of their feature flag experiments are very in your face, too. Still, 3 minutes per day is just about my tempo. I don't care about literally anything in there except the learning part and consistently doing only one lesson per day makes them very nice and polite most of the time - I feel like I'm in the 'beg-these-for-money' instead of 'milk-them-dry' cohort. (Or maybe I'm in the permanent 'lets-be-nice-for-them' long running experiment?)
dbbk 1y ago
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

Aurornis 1y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43827978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43827978 The leaked AI memo had phrases like “productivity expectations will rise” and off comments about how they now know that LLMs “work better with context”. It felt like the Duolingo CEO saw the trend of companies embracing AI coding tools and tried to come up with a way of being the on of the most extreme thought leaders in going “AI first”, without really understanding anything beyond surface level.

zzzeek 1y ago

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/ 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.

sandinmyjoints 1y ago
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.
- Zmajche 1y ago
  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.
  - sandinmyjoints 1y ago
    I'll pass this along! Since you mentioned installing, I'm assuming this was an app, not web. Android or iOS?
    - Zmajche 1y ago
      Android App via PlayStore...
- zzzeek 1y ago
  I will try it. From my other comments you can gather I'm a sad lifelong monolinguist despite having a terrific Spanish foundation in middle school, and I can hardly imagine ever being conversational. But it's only been a week

NKosmatos 1y ago

My favorite punch line from the post "...serves to highlight just how out of touch the wealthy are with regular people..."

claytongulick 1y ago

It feels to me like business culture is on the peak "hill of stupidity" of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Collectively, businesses haven't yet realized what many developers have - the significant hidden costs with AI coding. We went through this with offshoring as well.

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vitro 1y ago

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

BrandiATMuhkuh 1y ago

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-92dc3c7a882b https://ir.canterbury.ac.nz/items/7da0e989-aa9f-4b92-86bd-92...

ema 1y ago
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.

whyowhy3484939 1y ago

Ah, Duolingo. What lengths people go just to avoid reading a book and talking to people. All this tech and I wonder how many people are now fluent in multiple languages compared to say a few decades ago. This is not academic. All signs are saying we are heading in the wrong direction[1] and more tech ain't going to solve shit. Literacy rates and numerical abilities are going down the drain faster than you can say "Claude". I suggest we really, really get our acts together and stop trusting tech to solve our non-tech problems.[2] “It is actually hard to imagine that every third person you meet on the street has difficulties reading even simple things.” [3] [1] https://www.oecd.org/en/about/news/press-releases/2024/12/adult-skills-in-literacy-and-numeracy-declining-or-stagnating-in-most-oecd-countries.html https://www.oecd.org/en/about/news/press-releases/2024/12/ad... [2] https://archive.is/zCxBl https://archive.is/zCxBl (The Atlantic: the elite college students who can't read books) [3] https://archive.is/4k96F#selection-1989.261-1989.387 https://archive.is/4k96F#selection-1989.261-1989.387 (Financial Times: are we becoming a post-literate society?)

zzzeek 1y ago
> What lengths people go just to avoid reading a book and talking to people. odd take, do you have the same negative sentiment for the entire field of language instruction? introductory German class at a local college? 7th grade French ? things like that?
- whyowhy3484939 1y ago
  What introductory German class does not use books and does not talk to people?
  - zzzeek 1y ago
    oh, so you only mean like the gamified nature of duolingo? Lots of language apps have lessons that are interactive versions of language books and they also include conversational practice with language models. Conversational practice with humans is not necessarily easily available nor is it that appropriate if you are just learning a language and can't have simple conversations yet. Babbel for example is pretty comparable to a traditional language class in how it's structured. It's pretty convenient that I can use it any time of day and as often as I want, from my car or whatever.

wilg 1y ago

I recently started using Duolingo and it seems pretty good.

j_timberlake 1y ago

They don't have a moat. They could have built one by turning the app into an actual game. Casuals love farming games, give them a farm where the crops grow by learning new words. Too late now though.

827a 1y ago

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.

colordrops 1y ago

Duolingo has gone to such shit after they've removed humanistic feature in the app such as the question discussion board and avatar photos. It's so dry and mechanistic now. It's ironic as the whole purpose of language learning is human connection.

latenightcoding 1y ago

It's crazy this app has barely changed in like a decade, they even went public but the learning experience is just worse

InTheArena 1y ago

Given the typo at the very start of the article (maybe it's a .za thing?) "Unfortunately the PR team may soon be replaced by AI as this latest statement has done anything but instil confidence in the firm’s users." it's worth pointing out that Grammarly would have caught that.

brightbeige 1y ago
Instil? https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/instil https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/instil > Australia, Ireland and UK standard spelling of instill. (And presumably South Africa as well)

bgwalter 1y ago

It is astonishing that a CMU professor can sink so low. Then again, he also invented reCaptcha. Of course, DuoLingo is superfluous. Watching movies in the target language with subtitles in you own language is more fun and has quicker results.

exogeny 1y ago
It's embarrassing. It's not Richard Grenell bad, but it's close.

InTheArena 1y ago

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.

_se 1y ago
[flagged]
owebmaster 1y ago
AI will change everything but the companies trying to adapt like Duolingo or Shopify are doing will become the new Yahoos and Nokias.
przemub 1y ago
People behave as if AI were going to eat the software. I, and many others, don’t believe that is going to happen.
- BeetleB 1y ago
  I'm guessing you're a SW engineer. It doesn't matter what you think. It matters what high level managers/CEOs think.
  - dghlsakjg 1y ago
    In the short term, maybe. In the long term, actual results will tell us what parts of the process matter.
  - Thrymr 1y ago
    > I'm guessing you're a SW engineer. > It doesn't matter what you think. It matters what high level managers/CEOs think. In the short term, perhaps. In the longer term, it matters whether it actually works.
pessimizer 1y ago
It seems like a combination of 1) extreme denial of the possibility of change anywhere ever (which is standard middle-class anxiety - your extremely specialized skills have been devalued, and now you're poor), and 2) cynicism is safe because most things fail. Cynicism is even safer when a bunch of people are trying to sell you something, because most of them are going to be con-men. But I think the modern machine learning methods of the past few years are as important as the computer, and we're just starting the period between the computer and the transistor, during which time we're using vacuum tubes and giant iron rings to build them. When the AI-transistor comes along, it's going to be the engine of all human technological process for the next century. edit: if there's anything that AI is going to be really, really good at, very soon, it's going to be teaching people languages. I don't have a problem with Duolingo going to AI; it wasn't exactly great before. It's just a brand and cartoons, not a method. Being that it wasn't great before, though, I have no idea what qualifies Duolingo to come up with language-teaching AI. I don't think gamification skills transfer. If anything, they need to be furiously hiring extremely high level, extremely expensive AI people and second-language learning academics/linguists. Duolingo lost its purpose as an app when it figured out that creating a translation army was pointless, and it lost most of its usefulness when it froze, then deleted the forums. Now it's just a cloud of IP. They might as well start selling a soda pop.

leoc 1y ago

I've never had the pleasure of experiencing DuoLingo myself, but by all accounts it's an exceptionally time-inefficient way of learning a language. If the objective is to have fun playing a buzzy mobile game with the rest of the world then whatever, but if you actually want to make progress in a language you'd be much better advised to head over to something like Refold https://refold.la/ https://refold.la/ or Dreaming Spanish https://www.dreamingspanish.com/ https://www.dreamingspanish.com/ . Even if you simply must have a phone app which does everything for you, you'd probably do better with something like Busuu https://www.busuu.com https://www.busuu.com or Glossika https://ai.glossika.com/ https://ai.glossika.com/ . So the AI furore is a bit ironic: people profess to hate "bullshit jobs", but if anything is a bullshit job it's probably providing the manpower for a language-learning app which doesn't actually teach languages effectively. Replacing mechanical-Turk slop with AI slop probably is a genuine productivity gain unleashed by AI here, yes? OTOH a drop in subscriber numbers and total user-hours is probably a good thing too, so don't let any of this put you off from giving up on DuoLingo.

Alex-Programs 1y ago
The language-specific subreddits also have excellent advice.
- leoc 1y ago
  The quality of advice on Reddit seems to be variable, unfortunately. Apparently https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese is full of people who've spent years doing Genki (https://genki3.japantimes.co.jp/en/ https://genki3.japantimes.co.jp/en/ , probably an even bigger sinkhole for money, time and enthusiasm than DuoLingo) with little to show for it who are determined to drag everyone else into the same crab-bucket, for instance. OTOH https://www.reddit.com/r/latin/ https://www.reddit.com/r/latin/ used to be very helpful.
  - sushid 1y ago
    What do you recommend?

varelse 1y ago

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eigenspace 1y ago

For me, the problem with Duolingo has always been that the content is just too lowest-common-denominator, and this will just bring it down even lower. I switched a while ago to Seedlang (https://www.seedlang.com/ https://www.seedlang.com/), and while it only supports French, German, and Spanish, I can at least say that the German course is everything I actually wanted from Duolingo. Every exercise involves a real video of a real German speaker speaking in German. You get to hear them at the same time as you see their face, which is not something you'd think is a big deal, but absolutely does make a big difference. When it's your turn to say a phrase, it records your voice and plays it back to you, rather than use some shitty model to try and guess if you spoke correctly. By listening to your own voice you can clearly hear when you're getting things right versus when you're getting things wrong. Early on, German speakers would often comment on how my accent was quite good for my level, and I think this is big part of that. IMO Duolingo's attempt to try and scale to every language as fast as possible just makes it a worse product than something 'artisanal' like Seedlang (though of course, if there's no artisanal resources, then Duolingo might have some value to offer)

Archonical 1y ago
I studied German for 3 years in university, dabbled in German duo-lingo, and completed all German courses on Memrise. I don't see how one can learn German fluently using Duolingo (or even Memrise, which I think is much better). It's great for vocabulary, but I think understanding the grammar requires understanding the theory which I didn't see when I used these applications.
- tetris11 1y ago
  I did every German module on Duolingo in a 5-month preparation for moving to Germany for my job, and I got the coveted Golden Owl to prove my proficiency... ... only for me to get to Germany and realise very early on that I would need to do a basic A1 language course. The app was gibberish; the pronunciations were wrong, the genders were misleading, and the daily interactions they tried to drill in me were far from useful. The overinflated proficiency instilled in me by the app, made me genuinely believe I could interact easily with a German - a delusion I was quickly and painfully made aware of, much to my chagrin.

hiAndrewQuinn 1y ago

This might be a nice time for me to plug the FOSS software I've been quietly building over the last ~3 years for English speaking learners of Finnish specifically. I've recently collected them all onto a little landing page at https://finbug.xyz/ https://finbug.xyz/ . I run into other immigrants to this country semi-regularly now who say they've used at least one of these tools, most commonly the frequency deck or reverse-conjugator/decliner. It's been a surprisingly fruitful way to make professional connections here.

thenberlin 1y ago

If an LLM is what's going to teach me a new language, why would I ever pay some middleman $100-200 a year for an app wrapper? This guy doesn't seem to realize that embracing AI-first doesn't just put his employees on the chopping block, it actually suggests his whole company is unnecessary. This is what I don't think the "AI-first" business crowd understands -- in many cases, the moment you admit the humans in your organization can be wholesale replaced by AI, that's a sign it's possible your whole ass business case could be unnecessary LLM middleware.

missedthecue 1y ago
Literally millions of people already pay for LLM wrappers for all sorts of different products and services.

zombiwoof 1y ago

Welcome to the Scam Altman future hellscape

foxfired 1y ago

Slight tangent. I remember many jobs ago when our CEO went on a mobile-first campaign. I literally watched him talk about the type of innovations we were making to cater to our customers, while I was writing a regex to redirect mobile to m.example.com. Before the year was over, the campaign had switched to Big Data. We signed up for some big data services, the CEO talked to the media about it, but we never did anything with the service. The thing is, it worked. The company was sold for over a billion dollars. I've written about Duolingo being a game first before anything else. I still get the occasional email that "Exposes" me and asked me to retract the article. But for Duolingo's CEO, none of this matters because it's a PR stunt that either works or doesn't. And right now, it looks like it didn't work. But that's ok, because quantum is going to change the game.

ccppurcell 1y ago

It is my informed opinion as an educator, most recently in English as a second language, and as a language learner that duolingo is at best woefully old fashioned and at worst completely broken, pedagogically speaking. It's high time the owl fell from its high perch.

pessimizer 1y ago
> woefully old fashioned and at worst completely broken This is the part that I'm shocked people don't notice. A young high school teacher who keeps up with the literature is going to be miles ahead of Duolingo pedagogically. One of the reasons I'm bullish on AI in language learning is that you could do fully-reactive, individualized TPRS* with AI. You could even simulate other students. [*] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TPR_Storytelling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TPR_Storytelling

landl0rd 1y ago

For the most part consumers do stuff like this and then change their minds or forget about it. Boycotts like this rarely work. Don't overestimate the conscientiousness of the average consumer. Duolingo is still going to do this, and probably get worse, and users will continue to use it.

catigula 1y ago

The CEO of my company is the same person. Narcissism blinders on, "you can develop an entire application in minutes, we can fire our whole staff". Doesn't realize that if this was true he'd be fired as well. The entrepreneurial mind isn't responding well to the realities and risks of AI. It appears to be oil and water.

jgalt212 1y ago

I was not surprised when Klarna or Shoppify made these inane AI uber alles type statements to placate the investor class. Having followed and envied Louis for quite some time, I did fee very disappointed when he jumped into the deep end of the AI pool without looking.

bonif 1y ago

The Dildo of AI Rarely Arrives Lubed

9cb14c1ec0 1y ago

Kind of funny to watch the crazy AI hype group-think that probably originates in the CEO group-chats gradually evaporate as reality hits that AI is a useful tool instead of a be-all, end-all.

bayareapsycho 1y ago

Their PE ratio is 256. What really matters is convincing wall street to keep funneling money into their company stock So what he's doing makes a lot of sense. Have to keep the stock high and sell off before reality kicks in. All of this money floating around incentivizes this behavior

in_ab 1y ago

I fear AI will lead to inevitable decline in software quality. A lot of companies are going to try to replace humans with AI. And if the end result doesn't elicit backlash, more will follow. It may not fly in some domains, but a lot of people are already used to using buggy software.

einrealist 1y ago

Good times for ex-contractors of Duolingo to have AI help them build a honest competitor app. Just watched a video about Sears today and it reminded me how fast top dogs can fail.

djeastm 1y ago

I learned a foreign language as an adult, but the way I did it was by being an Army linguist who spent a year and a half in full-time training with native speakers, plus multiple re-trainings for the next five years. I have no idea how people are learning a language using an app for a few minutes a day.

Barrin92 1y ago
> I have no idea how people are learning a language using an app for a few minutes a day They don't but this is also not the point and seems to account for the frustrations expressed in the conversation. Before I decided to get serious about learning Japanese I spent a few months on Duolingo. It taught me hiragana, katakana, a few kanji, maybe 1k words but obviously I couldn't really speak Japanese. But I also didn't expect to, I looked at it as "it's better than wasting another 10 minutes on twitter". And for that it worked perfectly well, honestly better than I thought.

nchmy 1y ago

Genuine question: If Duolingo was being started today by a solo developer, and they essentially just created some sort of wrapper over [insert LLM] to be a language tutor, would there be outrage? I suspect not. So, this seems to be more about getting rid of workers than it is about AI. Would people use it? Probably, and I think it would VERY well - at least in comparison to current options. ChatGPT is a fantastic Spanish tutor (though I'm largely self-taught, through immersion). So, something that actually has some sort of structured curriculum and the LLM assesses your progress, gives guidance, explains why things are the way they are and how they compare (eg particular verb tenses and conjugations, order of words/syntax etc...), could surely be enormously useful. It probably wouldnt even be that hard to open-source some system prompts for a curriculum...

ark296 1y ago

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.

jwilber 1y ago

I’ve worked in AI for years (and still do!), but something about the callousness of his comments, the almost celebratory replacement of human labor, immediately made me delete Duolingo. I was a daily user and have switched over to Pimsleur.

dinkumthinkum 1y ago

Duolingo has seemed like a very sketchy app to me for a long time. I have used and recommended it when it first came out. However, when I used it more seriously, I realized he Duolingo is nearly pointless. It is pretty terrible way to fool yourself into thinking you are learning a language. It is at best a way to kind of get familiar with the language but it is not a primary or secondary resource, perhaps more of a fifth or sixth resource and only then more as a break. I think you can just spend a lot of time on Duolingo, which they want, accomplishes nothing at all other than accumulating their useless badges. If they want to go “AI first,” I invite to consider just shutting down their business altogether and tell people to just use ChatGPT for learning, or better yet, with their vision of the future, just tell people not yo bother learning another language at all.

lawrenceyan 1y ago

As long as you recognize what Duolingo "actually is" you'll understand why it's worth what it is today. Not everything is always surface level.

bfrog 1y ago

so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should Dr Ian Malcolm was spot on except it wasn’t Dinosaurs that turned out to be the idiotic creation instead it’s massively wasteful chatbots

username135 1y ago

The app has gone down hill but i still use it because i cant find any decent Irish programs elsewhere. I dont mind the gamification but can see why its annoying. Once I fond a suitable replacement, i will cancel my membership. I will say this, ive learned quite a lot of the language simply through the app. I am highly motivated though.

mzs 1y ago
Watch these over and over for a month: https://youtu.be/496H4TdJIiw https://youtu.be/496H4TdJIiw
- username135 1y ago
  Thanks!

tonyhart7 1y ago

I think about this point, Company that stick to their human workflow would gain brand recognition from customer instead especially over service that selling service about human interaction (translation, language, communication etc)

crakhamster01 1y ago

Is any of this pushback having a material impact on the company? It seems like their stock is still hovering around all-time highs.

nickfromseattle 1y ago

My conversations with non-tech friends and family indicates non-tech people don't like AI because of the perception that it will negatively impact their jobs / career, and ability to pay bills. This makes sense to me. 54% of Americans have below a 6th grade reading level, these folks will not be orchestrating AI agents, they will be replaced by AI agents.

Samyuktha_d 1y ago

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