Duolingo CEO says AI is a better teacher than humans—but schools will exist ‘because you still need childcare’
Duolingo CEO says AI is a better teacher than humans—but schools will exist ‘because you still need childcare’
Duolingo replaced its contract workers with AI. Now its eyes are set on schools.
Amazing how this guy has no idea that schools are just as much about socializing and learning to deal with other people and situations you'll be in for the rest of your life. That's not "child care," it's a structured environment where the main goal is learning and the real benefits are everything else on the fringes.
I ended my sub and deleted my account when they announced they’d be replacing their contract workers with AI.
Lingonaut looks promising. And I’ve been trying out Language Transfer for Spanish. I’ve learned more about how Spanish “works” in an hour of Language Transfer than I did with months of Duolingo. I’m smacking myself for wasting the time - though I do enjoy the gamification.
"Try Super Duolingo now to avoid interruptions." Interruptions which are only there to promote Super Duolingo in the first place.
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Company replaces humans with AI.
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Consumers notice a drop in quality and stop using the product
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CEO makes controversial public statements about AI and his product to get into the news.
Okay buddy, that's one way of telling people that your doubling down on your mistake.
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What a load of crap. Big tech is not the solution, it’s not even the question, it’s the problem.
AI is better at running companies than humans-but CEOs will still exist 'because they want money'
As someone who has actually been in a classroom and dealt with 20 kids—fuck off CEO with no real experience dealing with people.
Personalities, learning types, inequity, and so much more contribute to how people learn. A computer program cannot account for this. Also, what are you going to do when a kid doesn’t want to learn from a computer? Strap them down, force their hands on a keyboard, and shock them if they move or visit a program/site that isn’t what you want in that moment of teaching?
Good. Fucking. Luck.
P.S., Duolingo doesn’t do a good job of making you fluent in a language. It might give you basics of understanding, but you aren’t going to be chatting like any sort of native unless things have changed in the last 4 years or so since I tried it. Your platform is piss poor, and the juice leaking from skunk’s rotten anus has more relevance than you.
Puts his children in private school without computers.
shut up dude your AI can't even conjugate italian are verbs properly
CEO disdain for humanity, as exhibited by this individual, makes me wonder if people named Luigi might feel that they are needed by CEOs.
I'm sure this won't be a popular comment, but I can see how having a motivated learner in a 1:1 lesson with an AI might be better for that person than sitting in a class with 35 other people, most of whom don't want to be there, running through a syllabus that the teacher may not even like, at the pace of the slowest kid in class.
I regret that I have no duolingo account that I can cancel.
I absolutely cannot wait for kids to learn about “vegetative electron microscopy”
AI absolutely cannot replace teachers.
Augment possibly but replace? No.
By augment I mean provide some help at the direction of the teacher.
https://retractionwatch.com/2025/02/10/vegetative-electron-microscopy-fingerprint-paper-mill/
I say: I can't stand the CEO of Duolingo, and his supremely punchable smirk-face.
Current LLMs aren't better teachers.
They might be in the future. But definitely not now.
That's pretty hilarious considering I've been using Duolingo (cracked apks) for years and these last couple of weeks the sentences it's been giving me are insane and weird, stupidly awkward things that no one would ever say IRL.
Airlearn isn't quite there as far as speech recognition but the lessons are a lot more natural and it actually tells you why and explains different parts of the culture around the language and why an idea might be expressed a certain way rather than how we're used to in English. An LLM could never.
AI can't teach you manners lmao
Certainly nobody needs Duolingo to learn anything
I learn better with humans...this is billionaire excrement
In other news: AI is a better human than Duolingo CEO
And that just underlines my decision to quit Duolingo when it got contaminated with AI stop.
I can tell you from experience that AI was worse at teaching me a language than humans were.
Children will just jailbreak the AI. I managed to jailbreak far-right chatbots (until certain platforms started to block common phrases for this purpose), children will be able to do it too.
Also AI is so caca at most jobs the best it could do is help corporations to either produce more low-quality services (which at one point, won't be sustainable) and help in bluffing their way to lower wages and lesser worker protections. At this point, it's barely more than a toy and a spam machine, and most of its supposed cost cuttings rely on both speculations of its future and investment funds to make it look like it's a "free" technology.
Duolingo is literal trash.
He's not wrong. Schools are day-prisons where parents leave their kids while they slave away to make the rich richer. Most teachers (in my experience at least) are absolute shit, and so are the education systems (again in my experience). And before the 'in the Scandinavian countries...' bunch comes: I know a few Nordic people, not impressed, they just have lots of money to throw at the problems (which I would say is the secret for every other statistics they excel in).
Quick edit: that being said I don't know anyone, including myself, that has learned a language with Duolingo. Can be fun but it's useless for actually learning.
you know, I still say punching people who say stupid stuff, would cut down the stupid stuff people say, by at least half...
Depends what you want kids to learn.
Propaganda, yes; everything else, no...
ai can teach, and cheaper than humans, but I doubt its better than most of us
What a cunt
He's right. I went to highschool with 50 kids per class, where teachers played on their phones, or hid in their office, or just switched jobs requiring year round substitutes. I took remedial math because that was what had room, and when my teacher realized that he looked like he died inside a little bit.
He's right... in that AI is better than some teachers. AI is a step up for some kids.
I'll be looking for a new Spanish app when my subscription expires next year now, alas.
fuck this fetus looking cum stain.
the green duolingo owl has the chance to do the funniest thing
I noticed too many hallucinations in AI, We don't want to learn the wrong things. For beginners, the risk of learning the wrong thing is high and just add to confusion. I switched back to humans for most things.
Yep