> “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,” admit

> “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.