Duolingo more than doubles courses as 'AI-first' push draws heat

The Star

01-05-2025

Even by Silicon Valley standards, Duolingo Inc has set itself apart with its aggressive push to infuse artificial intelligence into all corners of its business while also openly acknowledging humans may no longer be needed for certain roles.
On April 29, Duolingo signalled that approach is helping to rapidly expand its language-learning courses, even as it puts the company at the center of a white-hot debate over AI's impact on the labor market and the quality of the work the technology produces.
The company is launching 148 new courses it developed with the help of generative AI, more than doubling its foreign-language courses for non-English speakers in a year. Specifically, speakers of Spanish, Portuguese and European tongues can now learn Japanese, Korean and Chinese. And people who speak Asian languages can learn the most popular non-English languages. The new courses will primarily support beginner levels, with more advanced content to be introduced throughout the year.
The new offerings mark the company's largest content expansion and would help it reach more than a billion potential learners globally, the company added.
"It took about 12 years to develop our first 100 courses,' co-founder and chief executive officer Luis von Ahn said in a statement to Bloomberg News. "With the help of AI, we're able to create new content that can improve how people learn at a scale and speed we've never seen before.'
The announcement comes two days after the company publicised a companywide email from von Ahn, who called Duolingo's use of AI to accelerate content creation "one of the best decisions we made recently', even if it means taking "occasional small hits on quality'. Last January, Duolingo cut 10% of contract roles to accompany the shift, and von Ahn continued to double down on what he calls an "AI-first' strategy that aims to reduce repetitive tasks.
He said other parts of the business will need to increase their AI usage, while the company will "gradually stop' using contractors to do work that artificial intelligence can handle. Headcount will only be allotted when a team cannot automate more of their work, he added.
While the company's AI investments cut into its gross margins in the fourth quarter, that was "near-term pain,' as a Needham analyst described it at the time, which some bullish investors were willing to accept. The company also said that new AI-powered paid features helped add net subscribers at a record pace, contributing to a better-than-expected sales outlook for the year. (The company is set to report first-quarter results on Thursday.)
But some users are pushing back against the AI shift and have expressed frustration at the company's preference for quantity over quality, going so far as to threaten cancelling their subscriptions.
"This makes me sad because I've noticed the changes in the app and they're not good,' one LinkedIn commenter wrote in response to the company's post. "Speaking and writing exercises are marking my answers wrong when they never were before. The Japanese course was so much better before you guys overhauled it with this AI mess. Bring back the humans.'
"I'm getting more and more dissatisfied with all the unnatural sentences and lack of 'real life situation' content and conversations too,' another wrote.
A spokesperson for Duolingo said contractors are still involved in content creation work, particularly in language specialist roles. "We rigorously test all content, AI or human-generated, and there's no evidence that AI leads to more mistakes.'
"Most learners can't tell whether a sentence was written by a human or an AI and we're not seeing any notable activity around subscription cancelations,' the spokesperson said. "Our fun, distinctive style isn't going anywhere, and it's even part of how we prompt AI for content generation.'
The spokesperson also said there are no plans to reduce contractor headcount "immediately', adding that the company will work with each business function "to understand the opportunity and timeline for each team'.
Duolingo employees have been using models like OpenAI's GPT to create curriculums since 2023, but investments into "shared content systems' were also key to the ramp-up in course materials, Head of AI Klinton Bicknell said in an interview. That means that the content in say, an English class, will be the same regardless of what language you decide to learn it in. Previously, the English course for French speakers was developed separately from that for Spanish speakers, he said.
"In the past, when this was mostly human driven, we had real trade-offs between, well, is it better to take the human resources that we have and deploy that to creating another course that is really in high demand, or better to iterate on a current course that we already have out there?' Bicknell said. "But in an AI world, we can do both.'
Instead of making humans do all quality reviews, the company is having workers create the data that train AI to do more validations, Bicknell said. That's changed the composition of the content creation team. In addition to the existing learning scientists who iterate upon what the AI produces, the company has added more engineers and AI researchers who set parameters for the AI to evaluate content.
The company is "continually evaluating a lot of different models' besides OpenAI's, including some from Anthropic, Google and some open-source options, to determine which ones are best for a given task. For example, the team found that Anthropic's Claude was "much better' at doing certain types of math when creating content for its relatively new math curriculum, Bicknell said.
Generative AI has also helped Duolingo venture into new subject areas. Its new chess course, launched in beta for some iOS users last week, grew out of a prototype created by two non-engineers – a product manager and a designer – using the Cursor AI coding tool.
The manpower behind that course has since grown to include engineers, and its development continues to be AI-intensive because the technology will be necessary for the computer opponent to learn and match the skill level of a user. – Bloomberg