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I was happily paying for Duolingo Super, despite being unconfident in its pedagogy, until they announced they were replacing their human curriculum writers. Dr

• 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.