The backlash against Duolingo going ‘AI-first’ didn’t even matter
Duolingo announced On Wednesday it beat its quarterly estimates of income, although the company had to deal with widespread recoil for choosing to embrace generative AI over human employees. Duolingo Stock Rose Almost 30% On the news.
In April, CEO Luis von Ahn shared That Duolingo would become an “AI-first” company that can exercise its use of contract workers. He also discouraged teams from hiring more employees, unless the team can no longer automate his work. With the use of generative AI, Duolingo introduced 148 new language courses, more than doubling its earlier offers.
“Without AI it would cost us for decades to scale up our content to more students,” Von Ahn wrote at the time. “We owe it to our students to get them this content as quickly as possible.”
Although some Duolingo users have argued that these AI functions make the app worse, the financial statistics of the company tell a different story. Now the company to expect Earning more than $ 1 billion in income this year, and daily active users have grown by 40% on an annual basis. The growth is considerable, but falls in the lower range of the estimates of growth between 40% and 45%, who brought an investor to Von Ahn on the quarterly call on Wednesday.
‘The reason we came [in] Against the bottom was because I said some things about AI, and I didn’t give enough context. That’s why we got some recoil on social media, “said Von Ahn.” The most important thing is that we wanted to make the sentiment positive on our social media positive. We stopped posting edgy messages and started posting things that would make our sentiment more positive. That worked. “
On Tiktok, the top reactions about the videos of Duolingo often criticize the AI approach of the company. Snarky commentators will ask if videos with several people are made with AI, to which Duolingo will answer: “No, made by our great team!”
But even if the public sentiment has shifted against Duolingo, the Bottom Line is not … and from the perspective of the company that is important.
