Duolingo's CEO says AI will soon replace teachers. But ... should it?

CBC

22-05-2025

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Will AI soon teach a generation of kids to read, do long division, and that cooties aren't real, but germs are, so to stop wiping boogers under their desks?
Luis von Ahn, founder and CEO of language-learning app Duolingo, seems to think so.
Von Ahn has been stirring up a lot of controversy recently with his company's new AI-first strategy. Now, he's facing backlash over statements he made on the No Priors podcast earlier this month suggesting that AI is a better teacher than humans due to its ability to personalize learning.
He added that we'll likely soon see AI take over teachers in classrooms — maybe even in the next few years.
"Ultimately, I'm not sure that there's anything computers can't really teach you," von Ahn said on the May 8 episode of the podcast.
"I think you'll just see a lot better learning outcomes, in general," he added, while explaining that "it's just a lot more scalable to teach with AI than with teachers."
Von Ahn's comments come not long after Duolingo announced it was replacing its contract employees with AI, part of its AI-first strategy that includes using generative AI to build and launch 148 new courses. The company's announcements have not gone down well with many of the app's users, who have flooded Duolingo's social media accounts with comments decrying the decision or claiming to delete the app.
Over the weekend, amid the backlash, Duolingo deleted all of its posts on Instagram and TikTok, where it had garnered millions of followers. On Tuesday, the company posted a video on both platforms where someone in an owl mask with three eyes rants about how "everything came crashing down with one single post about AI."
And around the same time as all this, the media picked up on von Ahn's earlier interview on No Priors, where he clarified that teachers and schools still have a role to play: childcare.
"That doesn't mean the teachers are going to go away, you still need people to take care of the students," he said.
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A marketing statement?
Matthew Guzdial, an assistant computing science professor at the University of Alberta, says it's important to reframe von Ahn's claims as a marketing statement for Duolingo, and not an informed opinion on education.
"He's wanting to project strength and project that this is the way his company is doing it; this is the way everyone will be doing it going forward," Guzdial told CBC News.
For instance, Duolingo's website links to several peer-reviewed studies on the app's efficacy, including its use of generative AI, funded by the company. But a 2021 meta-analysis of some of its earlier studies, published in the journal Computer Assisted Language Learning, found that "although most studies report a positive impact of Duolingo on various language competencies, the accuracy of their results is rather debatable."
Most of the sample sizes in the studies that assessed achievement, for instance, ranged from one to 44. And most failed to consider potential confounding variables, such as motivation and demographics such as gender and ethnicity, the authors noted.
"In other words, eight years after the start of research on Duolingo, we still have very little conclusive evidence about its effectiveness and role in the language learning process," the study concluded.
And while one of the Duolingo-funded studies from 2025 did purport to show that self-efficacy increased in language-learning when subjects used AI features of the app, the authors also noted there was no control group, and that all six of the authors were employed by the company.
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Is AI a better teacher?
While AI can and has been used very effectively in education, Guzdial says there's no evidence that it can teach people better than a human can.
"There's basically no support for that claim," he said.
It depends on the type of AI, but if, for instance, a person is using a large language model like ChatGPT to look up answers to queries, no actual learning or internalization has happened, Guzdial said. The point of learning is not just to find the answers, but to understand them and build that mental muscle, he added.
"If you go to the gym to lift weights, it wouldn't be helpful if you brought a bulldozer to lift the weights for you. And that's sort of what ChatGPT is," he said.
Multiple studies and case studies have highlighted specific, positive uses of AI in learning — such as in generating teaching videos, helping clarify explanations, and predicting final grades to identify students who need additional support.
But, as an expansive 2023 literature review points out, AI can enhance learning, but can't fully replace human judgment and expertise. In addition, a 2024 study found no direct effect between a student's AI usage and reported grade average, but did find an indirect effect that those students who said they were more socially supported by humans than AI had higher grade performance.
Even ChatGPT acknowledges its own shortcomings. When CBC News posed it the question, "Is AI a better teacher than human teachers?" the chatbot answered that AI is better used in addition to teachers, and not as a replacement.
"AI can enhance teaching by taking over routine tasks, offering targeted support, and freeing up human educators to focus on what they do best—inspiring, mentoring, and connecting with students," the model said.
AI taking over jobs
In his comments on the No Priors podcast, von Ahn argued that a computer can give individualized attention to each student in a class, whereas a teacher can't.
"And really, the computer can actually … have very precise knowledge about what you, what this one student is good at and bad at," he said.
Duolingo's CFO Matt Skaruppa made similar comments last year, telling Morning Brew's After Earnings podcast that it's using AI to make its app as "effective as a human tutor."
"AI helps us replicate what a good teacher does. A good teacher helps you learn material, stay engaged, know where your weaknesses are, where your gaps are, so that you can focus on those things and get better," he said.
Von Ahn's comments come amid a new report that jobs traditionally done by women are more vulnerable to the impact of artificial intelligence than those done by men, especially in high-income countries. Teaching is an increasingly female-dominated profession.
Meanwhile, a compelling argument against AI replacing journalists unfolded this week as the Chicago Sun-Times was roasted for printing a syndicated summer reading list where most of the books didn't actually exist. The list was generated by a freelancer who used AI.