Latest news with #YannDubois
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Duolingo's rollercoaster week highlights a crucial risk factor to companies: Chart of the Week
New AI capabilities can mean instant reversals of fortune. Something that the language-learning platform Duolingo learned this week, on the receiving end of that novel dynamic. After the company posted a fantastic quarter, fueling a 30% stock surge, a stroke of bad luck saw it get jolted. It just so happened that OpenAI debuted its latest model, GPT-5, which demonstrated, among many other things, its ability to create a language-learning tool from a short prompt. OpenAI researcher Yann Dubois asked the model to create an app to help his partner learn French. And in a few minutes GTP-5 churned out several iterations, with flashcards, a progress tracker, and even a simple snake-style game with a French twist, a mouse and cheese variation to learn new vocab. Sign up for the Yahoo Finance Morning Brief By subscribing, you are agreeing to Yahoo's Terms and Privacy Policy The GPT-5 debut instantly wiped out a big chunk of Duolingo's gains, cutting the 30% gains in half. But the downward momentum continued Friday, with the stock sinking 4% to end the week. C'est la vie. The company's corporate lawyers, of course, did warn against this in its annual 10-K, albeit in boilerplate language. Tucked into the risk factors section, Duolingo notes, "It is possible that a new product could gain rapid scale at the expense of existing brands through harnessing a new technology (such as generative AI)." Consider this another warning to anyone making software. There's also irony in the wild swings. Part of Duolingo's successful quarter stemmed from the business's efficient use of AI. Gross margins, the company said, outperformed management expectations due to lower AI costs. And AI conversational features have become part of the company's learning tools, helping achieve double-digit subscriber growth. Earlier this year, CEO Luis von Ahn shared a memo on LinkedIn outlining his vision to make Duolingo an "AI-first" company. But the enthusiasm for AI, which led to the initial stock bump this week, also led to the clawback. AI giveth and taketh away. Duolingo's roller-coaster ride highlights the risks of competing in the space. Rapid development and fierce competition can leave firms suddenly behind — perceived as under threat, inferior, or obsolete —from every iteration of OpenAI's models and from the moves of other influential AI players vying to transform computing and productivity. OpenAI's new flagship technology arrives more than two years after the release of GPT-4. But the onset of software on demand, of allowing people to conjure up apps using a few words and without any coding know-how, underscores why AI hardware companies are also such a hot play on Wall Street. Firms building out AI infrastructure are seen as even more desirable than cheaper-to-invest-in software companies. You can't just vibe code the construction of a data center. But to be fair to Duolingo, and to my mother-in-law, a high school French teacher, you can't exactly do that with language learning either. Hamza Shaban is a reporter for Yahoo Finance covering markets and the economy. Follow Hamza on X @hshaban.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Duolingo's rollercoaster week highlights a crucial risk factor to companies: Chart of the Week
New AI capabilities can mean instant reversals of fortune. Something that the language-learning platform Duolingo learned this week, on the receiving end of that novel dynamic. After the company posted a fantastic quarter, fueling a 30% stock surge, a stroke of bad luck saw it get jolted. It just so happened that OpenAI debuted its latest model, GPT-5, which demonstrated, among many other things, its ability to create a language-learning tool from a short prompt. OpenAI researcher Yann Dubois asked the model to create an app to help his partner learn French. And in a few minutes GTP-5 churned out several iterations, with flashcards, a progress tracker, and even a simple snake-style game with a French twist, a mouse and cheese variation to learn new vocab. Sign up for the Yahoo Finance Morning Brief By subscribing, you are agreeing to Yahoo's Terms and Privacy Policy The GPT-5 debut instantly wiped out a big chunk of Duolingo's gains, cutting the 30% gains in half. But the downward momentum continued Friday, with the stock sinking 4% to end the week. C'est la vie. The company's corporate lawyers, of course, did warn against this in its annual 10-K, albeit in boilerplate language. Tucked into the risk factors section, Duolingo notes, "It is possible that a new product could gain rapid scale at the expense of existing brands through harnessing a new technology (such as generative AI)." Consider this another warning to anyone making software. There's also irony in the wild swings. Part of Duolingo's successful quarter stemmed from the business's efficient use of AI. Gross margins, the company said, outperformed management expectations due to lower AI costs. And AI conversational features have become part of the company's learning tools, helping achieve double-digit subscriber growth. Earlier this year, CEO Luis von Ahn shared a memo on LinkedIn outlining his vision to make Duolingo an "AI-first" company. But the enthusiasm for AI, which led to the initial stock bump this week, also led to the clawback. AI giveth and taketh away. Duolingo's roller-coaster ride highlights the risks of competing in the space. Rapid development and fierce competition can leave firms suddenly behind — perceived as under threat, inferior, or obsolete —from every iteration of OpenAI's models and from the moves of other influential AI players vying to transform computing and productivity. OpenAI's new flagship technology arrives more than two years after the release of GPT-4. But the onset of software on demand, of allowing people to conjure up apps using a few words and without any coding know-how, underscores why AI hardware companies are also such a hot play on Wall Street. Firms building out AI infrastructure are seen as even more desirable than cheaper-to-invest-in software companies. You can't just vibe code the construction of a data center. But to be fair to Duolingo, and to my mother-in-law, a high school French teacher, you can't exactly do that with language learning either. Hamza Shaban is a reporter for Yahoo Finance covering markets and the economy. Follow Hamza on X @hshaban. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
WIRED
5 days ago
- Health
- WIRED
OpenAI Finally Launched GPT-5. Here's Everything You Need to Know
OpenAI's blog post claims that GPT-5 beats its previous models on several coding benchmarks, including SWE-Bench Verified (scoring 74.9 percent), SWE-Lancer (GPT-5-thinking scored 55 percent), and Aider Polyglot (scored 88 percent), which test the model's ability to fix bugs, complete freelance-style coding tasks, and work across multiple programming languages. During the press briefing on Wednesday, OpenAI post-training lead Yann Dubois prompted GPT-5 to 'create a beautiful, highly interactive web app for my partner, an English speaker, to learn French.' He tasked the AI to include features like daily progress, a variety of activities like flashcards and quizzes, and noted that he wanted the app wrapped up in a 'highly engaging theme.' After a minute or so, the AI-generated app popped up. While it was just one on-rails demo, the result was a sleek site that delivered exactly what Dubois asked for. 'It's a great coding collaborator, and also excels at agentic tasks,' Michelle Pokrass, a post-training lead, says. 'It executes long chains and tool calls effectively [which means it better understands when and how to use functions like web browsers or external APIs], follows detailed instructions, and provides upfront explanations of its actions." OpenAI also says in its blog post that GPT-5 is 'our best model yet for health-related questions.' In three OpenAI health-related LLM benchmarks—HealthBench, HealthBench Hard, and HealthBench Consensus—the system card (a document that describes the product's technical capabilities and other research findings) states that GPT-5-thinking outperforms previous models 'by a substantial margin.' The thinking version of GPT-5 scored 25.5 percent on HealthBench Hard, up from o3's 31.6 percent score. These scores are validated by two or more physicians, according to the system card. The model also allegedly hallucinates less, according to Pokrass, a common issue for AI where it provides false information. OpenAI's safety research lead Alex Beutel adds that they've "significantly decreased the rates of deception in GPT-5.' 'We've taken steps to reduce GPT-5-thinking's propensity to deceive, cheat, or hack problems, though our mitigations are not perfect and more research is needed,' the system card says. 'In particular, we've trained the model to fail gracefully when posed with tasks that it cannot solve.' The company's system card says that after testing GPT-5 models without access to web browsing, researchers found its hallucination rate (which they defined as 'percentage of factual claims that contain minor or major errors') 26 percent less common than the GPT-4o model. GPT-5-thinking has a 65 percent reduced hallucination rate compared to o3. For prompts that could be dual-use (potentially harmful or benign), Beutel says GPT-5 uses 'safe completions,' which prompts the model to 'give as helpful an answer as possible, but within the constraints of remaining safe.' OpenAI did over 5,000 hours of red teaming, according to Beutel, and testing with external organizations to make sure the system was robust. OpenAI says it now boasts nearly 700 million weekly active users of ChatGPT, 5 million paying business users, and 4 million developers utilizing the API. 'The vibes of this model are really good, and I think that people are really going to feel that,' head of ChatGPT Nick Turley says. 'Especially average people who haven't been spending their time thinking about models.'
