- Following backlash to statements that Duolingo will be AI-first, threatening jobs in the process, CEO Luis von Ahn has tried to walk back his statement.
- Unfortunately, the CEO doesn’t walk back any of the key points he originally outlined, choosing instead to try, and fail to placate the maddening crowd.
- 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.
crazy how fast they ruined the reputation of this company. just a couple months ago, duo mascot and Duolingo streaks were cool and fun. they had a good thing going. but now it’s just another shit tech company again. they lost all the good will in like a month.
crazy how fast they ruined the reputation of this company.
they lost all the good will in like a month.
Twitter enter the chat
Twitter was going downhill hard already when Musk bought the place
I uninstalled yesterday, good riddance Duo.
How do these people become CEOs they’re as thick as several short planks nailed together.
Firstly every single company that has tried to replace its employees with AI has always ended up having issues. Secondly even if that wasn’t the case, people are not going to be happy about it so it’s not something you should brag publicly about.
If you’re going to replace all of your employees with AI just do it quietly, that way if it fails it’s not a public failure, and if it succeeds (it won’t) then you talk about it.
How do these people become CEOs they’re as thick as several short planks nailed together.
Being a CEO has absolutely nothing to do with intelligence, I guarantee you that Duolingo has employees who are far more intelligent than the CEO.
People who are smart in one or two domains often overestimate how smart they are in other domains. They develop a mental model, confirm it quickly, and never re-asses it.
The issue with AI, is we’re probably hitting our first real S curve with the current technology’s performance but a lot of people who bet big are only see the exponential part and assuming there won’t be a level off, or that the level of is far away.
There is no Moore’s law for AI.
Intelligence has nothing to do with success. These people are born into wealth, are wealth-adjacent, or are expert ass-kissers.
They also tend to be more greedy than others for wealth, status and power, and not imaginative enough to see that life is about more than this. So they dedicate their life to crawling up to the top of the corporate heap while everyone else gets on with actual real stuff.
If they do it quietly, they won’t get the stock price bump every company gets from saying they’re going to replace (costly) employees with AI.
People keep forgetting that these companies’ product is stock price, not whatever they’re advertising at any given moment.
Their “CEOs” have gotten sloppy because the grift has gotten so easy they naturally assume everyone is in on it. If everyone is in on the grift, there’s no need to lie about it.
FTFY: Pretends to walk back his statements. Fools no one.
So…tries and fails? 😛
except his AI.
Bragging about replacing your employees publicly over and over before actually being able to do so might cause an employee crisis
I gotta say, the icon of Duo looking like this, plus a snot coming out of one of its nostrils is what did it for me. No way to turn off this “feature” either. I’m not easily grossed out, so seeing it once or twice would have given me a chuckle. Seeing it every time I opened my phone? Nope.
I knew I wouldn’t be renewing my subscription right there and then (there were other reasons, but that one moved the decision faster.)
wait what… they made the official icon look miserable and added snot? wtf?
I think on iOS they added a thing where it would change based on the days you didn’t use Duolingo. Honestly at this point I think it speaks more about the sorry state of their company more than anything.
Yup! Google “Duolingo snot icon” and it will be the first image result.
Or you could visit the orange site and check it out there:
https://www.reddit.com/r/duolingo/comments/1f2deam/im_sick_right_now_and_this_is_the_app_icon/
holy fuck
People are unfair with this “CEO”. Its statement helped me move on from duolingo, which has seen significant decline in quality while never going beyond “a moderately bad way to start learning”, toward better, more developed, more cared for, cheaper, solutions.
So, thanks for that.
Please do share :)
I’m mainly interested in Japanese, so I’m currently looking at https://www.renshuu.org/ . In addition to just throwing random stuff at you, it gots some more in-depth training, explanations of stuff (something that never happened in duolingo), additional hints for alphabets including some mnemonics, and years of dedicated experience in the language. I can’t tell how it would feel long term, but so far even having some basic explanations is a great improvement.
I’m not gonna lie, I stopped using Renshuu due to having other resources at hand and because it just looks so rough, but I think it’s great for a free resource. The fact that they offer a shit ton of vocab/grammar/kanji study sets for free and community built ones is reminiscent of Anki, and Renshuu also uses a SRS. Lots of customization for reviews and answer options.
It’s certainly nowhere as eye-catching and addictive as Duolingo is, so beginners are probably more likely to give up than if they used Duolingo. But honestly, that site lost the point of what learning a language was supposed to be about anyway.
Sometimes I feel I should pick it back up, but at this point I want to focus more on reading/watching content for practice/learning.
If anyone wants to practice their Japanese or have questions, they can message me.
主よ、如何なさいましたか。
I love this headline so, so much
I want every headline to end with “…, fails”
“Amir, on his way to become successful in life…”
What I’d wonder is why it’s such massive expensive for Duolingo to hire 2 or 3 people to cover a language anyway. Presumably most of the work is contractual - hire somebody competent to produce a course, get somebody to say the lines, refine the course based on feed back and that’s mostly it.
Terminal MBA brain
I would assume it is more about time than money. It is a big investment making a whole functional system with llm (I have a hard time believing it is actually AI), it will cost a lot if done wrong (just like everything else). You can’t just prompt “make a course in Spanish” and get anything good out of it and you still need ppl who can quality check the output. I could see them use it to mass produce sentences and stories in different levels (not the actual story) and voice recordings, but not actually anything creative and I would assume that is the goal. But we have seen too many shitty products to believe in anything with llm.
boring, broken garbage content. monthly subscription fee. get the fuck out of here
There should be a federated system for blocking IP ranges that other server operators within a chain of trust have already identified as belonging to crawlers. A bit like fediseer.com, but possibly more decentralized.
(Here’s another advantage of Markov chain maze generators like Nepenthes: Even when crawlers recognize that they have been served garbage and they delete it, one still has obtained highly reliable evidence that the requesting IPs are crawlers.)
Also, whenever one is only partially confident in a classification of an IP range as a crawler, instead of blocking it outright one can serve proof-of-works tasks (à la Anubis) with a complexity proportional to that confidence. This could also be useful in order to keep crawlers somewhat in the dark about whether they’ve been put on a blacklist.
Did you comment on the wrong thread?
Duolingo is one of those fad apps that are overrated but are exquisitely trash once you force yourself to use them just to say “Hey, I have learned a language!”. Honestly, it was pretty funny seeing Duolingo comment on videos on all that despite it feeling forced, replacing it with AI just signifies Duolingo’s slow and painful demise
Just say AI bad use is cancer for human kind. Good use can help humans to do their task with less effort. So its all depend on usage.
I mean, it is too late. Canceled my sub, won’t be coming back.
Same. Deleted the app this weekend and let my 918 day streak evaporate.
I’m actually kind of surprised at how little it affected me, to be honest. I had a little bit pre-regret about losing the streak before deleting the app, but now a couple days later that feeling certainly doesn’t exist. AND there’s that benefit of no stupid owl guilt tripping you every day.
Check out “Language Drops” and “Rosetta Stone” if you’re looking for replacements. They both have very different approaches to language learning (both from each other and from Duolingo), but their content is at the very least much better curated than Duolingo’s.
I haven’t gone out of my way to check but AFAIK neither of them is jumping on the AI-before-anything-else train.
Drops had an ai feature where it would show you a “fact” at the end of each session, which was often completely wrong etymology.
Any recommendations for japanese?
I think both of them have Japanese (I remember seeing Rosetta Stone being praised for its Japanese content 20 years ago and I hope it would only have improved since), but I haven’t gone very far in the language in either app.
My recommendation is Language Transfer, a freely-available system for multiple languages that, in my opinion, helps you to think in another language better than any other system I have tried.
It has only 10 languages :(
Many libraries also give out subscriptions.to Mango. That is usually a paid app and much better than doulingo
Thanks for the recommendations!
I have actually switched over to Mango Languages because my library gives free access to it.
But if I don’t end up liking that I’ll give these a shot.
Would you recommend one over the other and if so why?
As a complete beginner, Drops is pretty good for learning random words and increasing vocabulary. As you advance through it you start seeing sentences too, but it doesn’t teach you how to make your own sentences, only to memorize the ones they pre-created.
Rosetta Stone doesn’t translate anything. All of the content is in the language you want to learn and it tries to introduce you to things in a natural way. For example it shows a picture of someone biting an apple and says “the man eats an apple”, then later shows other pictures related to one or multiple men, fruits and verbs, so you can get used to the differences between things just by observing those.
I just tried “Language Drops” and it was… interesting. It didn’t place me at the right level, so I got a very beginner lesson when I’m closer to intermediate (but definitely not fluent). I’m not sure I liked matching the pictures- the picture for “thank you” could mean different things depending on how you interpret the person’s face and body language- and then I hit the end of the free content for the day. It didn’t get to different tenses or even whole sentences- just basic vocabulary and no verbs. Maybe it ramps up quickly?
Sometimes the icons annoy me too and I wish the app had an option to always show the icon’s label, but at least you can tap on the icon to see the label.
I canceled my sub, but sadly not out of principle on the AI thing. I just accidentally hit the button that accepts an upgrade to the family plan and it didn’t look like there was an easy way to undo it so I just killed the whole subscription.
Where is the discussion for replacing CEOs with AI? Seems like predicting market trends based off of historical data and managing corporate resources would be just the sort of thing that AI would be good at. Plus it would cost way less and not require massive bonuses nor ownership of the company.
Well, the crux of the problem is that AI is trying to approximate intelligence. That’s not useful for a CEO.
boom
Respec the AI with lots of points into Charisma and Legal Dexterity. It also needs a large amount of Gold to get started.
