“I’ve said this in this in Q&As and many meetings, but I want to make it official: Duolingo is going to be AI-first.”
Four months ago, Luis von Ahn, CMU alumnus and CEO of the #1 rated language learning app, Duolingo, made a shocking statement of going “AI-first”. After the message was shared to the public, many people were openly disappointed in the company’s controversial decision.
Nowadays, the majority of workers fear that their job will be taken away by AI. According to Fortune, in 2023, around 40% of workers familiar with ChatGPT worried that AI agents would eventually take over their occupations. With Luis von Ahn making such a daring change in his company, it isn’t surprising to see people afraid and upset.
According to Luis von Ahn though, the message was taken out of context. Controversies surrounding Duolingo and employees, such as the company firing employees for AI are wrong, as Luis von Ahn explains himself in a NY Times interview that they’ve never laid off any full-time employees and don’t intend to ever.
However, what is true is that Duolingo has stopped using contractors (especially translators) and have replaced the manual content creation processes with AI. It raises the question, are companies becoming too comfortable with replacing human labor with AI?
With implementing AI, Duolingo has been able to launch 148 new language courses in lightning speed. According to Jessie Becker, Senior Director of Learning Design for Duolingo:
“It used to take a small team years to build a single new course from scratch. Now, by using generative AI to create and validate content, we’re able to focus our expertise where it’s most impactful, ensuring every course meets Duolingo’s rigorous quality standards.”
They have also announced Duolingo Max, a paid subscription learning experience powered directly by GPT-4, technology made by OpenAI. With the usage of AI, users with the subscription have access to new features called Explain My Answer and Roleplay. The names are self-explanatory, as the first one allows you to get personalized feedback on mistakes and the latter allows you to practice conversation skills using AI. Duolingo hopes that it “Max-imizes” users learning experience.
Many people claim to already see the quality of Duolingo decreasing after going “AI-first” and say that the updates so far have been “useless”. For instance, there was lots of backlash towards the new energy update. Some even state that Duolingo is now leaning towards being “money-orientated” rather than “learning-oriented”.
I’ve personally noticed that Duolingo has no changelog to make users aware of key updates to the platform, leaving them disorientated. There was a moment in time where I remember feeling confused when characters in the app began speaking with AI voices. There was no log of this change anywhere on the app and the Duolingo blog tends to be slow with its updates on new features. This lead to confusion on when and why this change happened.
