A week after declaring that AI would eventually replace contract workers at the language-learning app, Duolingo’s CEO said the company was “continuing to hire” and would support its existing workers in getting up to speed on the technology.
It follows buzzy startup Klarna in backing off an AI-first promise.
Luis von Ahn, co-founder and CEO, took to LinkedIn on Thursday to walk back a previous stance pushing AI use over human employees.
Already deleted my account, and it’s staying that way.
What I find to be the biggest danger about AI is that in subjects I’m an expert in — it is so routinely completely fucking wrong! However, in subjects that I am not an expert in, I cannot call out its lies as it says them with so much confidence. This makes me assume that most of what it says cannot be trusted.
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I forsee other apps replacing what duolingo does
Thats the circle of life. A product becomes so successful it has complete monopoly of its specific nieche, they start milking for every cent, it gets replaced by 10 similar products and becomes completely irrelevant.
Busuu is like what Duolingo used to be, but with native audio/video clips, actual grammar lessons, and the chance to write/speak sentences and have them graded by native speakers (other app users).
It’s free with ads, but the paid tier is also cheaper than Duolingo. 👍
Memrise isn’t bad.
I just deleted the app today based off his comments. Losing a 918 day streak (but, really, who cares?). A friend of mine deleted it this week, too, and lost 1,200 days.
He’ll “walk this back” today and 100% move forward with reducing the human workforce when the heat dies down. I don’t trust him one bit.
ALSO: check your local library. There’s a chance it has Mango Languages available for free. That’s what I switched to. Now that app sits in the same place where Duo used to be. Easy swap.
Thanks for the mango recommendation! It’s really solid and ties into my library system to boot.
Awesome!
Years ago, I used Duolingo only, every day for about 4-5 months until i reached a point where it was difficult enough that I was making too many mistakes.
I later did about 10 lessons with an online teacher, starting from the basics, pronunciation, grammar, alphabet and etc. When I carried on with duolingo after the lessons, it was so much easier that I was getting 100% rights. Just 10 lessons were better than months on duolingo.
Made me realise that duolingo and similar apps are not the best way to learn.
Duolingo is absolute shit for the basic sentence structure and rules because nothing is explained. Especially if learning a language with a different script like cyrilic or arabic or chinese writting.
I had some issues with norwegian because certain rules were not really clear and also not explained. They also removed the comments part where people could discuss the sentences and such.
Once you know the basics duolingo actually becomes usable as a vocabulary expansion and maybe listening and speaking exercises.
Yea, i used to occasionally use it to test myself, about once a month.
Once I learnt the basics from the teacher and learnt 1K high frequency words on my own from a anki deck, I found I could read books and understand podcasts meant for learners. This never happened when I was using duolingo. When I used Duolingo, I would try every few week to read some native stuff and I never saw much improvement compared to the improvement I saw immediately after some lesson with a teacher.
After that I ditched duolingo and avoid other similar type of apps. I think apps that focus on high frequency vocab, like speakly (paid), clozemaster(paid), lingvist or 1k/5k high frequency ANKI deck are probably better, they are also using normal sentences.
I am still a beginner but now I focus more on consuming the language. I also see no harm using duolingo as a way to test yourself every now and then since its free.
The myth of the “job creator business owner” is such garbage. Business owners create jobs begrudgingly and as a last resort.
Yep, by new boss just fired 35 people out for 100 to save costs for investors, and then bitches things aren’t getting done and products are not evolving.
AI could have predicted this.
But we still see AI replacing you.
It’s not the only thing he said. Dude has been going bonkers. Saying schools are just daycares and AI is a better teacher.
Don’t use Duolingo
damage done, L nerd
Lmao. It’s because AI sucks
Every time I see this guy and the word Duilingo I think Ding-a-ling. As in Ding Dong Dickhead. Is it just me?
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Ai is cool for a few use cases in my daily work, like reformulating my mail to be more nice and professional sounding after I refer type an answer to people I genuinely think had a lobotomy.
