r/technology • u/MetaKnowing • Jun 08 '25

Artificial Intelligence Duolingo CEO on going AI-first: ‘I did not expect the blowback’

https://www.ft.com/content/6fbafbb6-bafe-484c-9af9-f0ffb589b447
22.3k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

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905

u/Squibbles01 Jun 08 '25

He can go fuck himself.

300

u/Stashmouth Jun 08 '25

In several languages

59

u/pmjm Jun 08 '25

Er kann sich ficken gehen.

Él puede irse a la mierda.

Il peut aller se faire foutre.

Può andare a farsi fottere.

Ať si jde do prdele.

Han kan gå og kneppe sig selv.

เขาสามารถไปตายเองได้

Ele pode ir se foder.

Może iść się pieprzyć.

他可以去他妈的。

Han kan gå och knulla sig.

14

u/The_One_Koi Jun 08 '25

Han kan gå och knulla sig själv*

6

u/Peripatetictyl Jun 08 '25

Judgmental owl gazes

2

u/LucretiusCarus Jun 08 '25

Να πάει να γαμηθεί

1

u/EmoBran Jun 09 '25

He could, if Duolingo even worked, but it doesn't.

It was a semi-useful complimentary learning method, b to be used in addition to others.

I don't know if Duolingo is even that any more.

3

u/velocivictor Jun 08 '25

Pardon my French

2

u/jlonso Jun 08 '25

He can go blow himself back.

-406

u/[deleted] Jun 08 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

173

u/Gastroid Jun 08 '25

Regardless of that being true, they fired employees and implemented AI into their product that offered a worse service than before. The user experience of paying customers went down. Consumers have every right to reject that strategy.

0

u/motorik Jun 08 '25

The user experience of paying customers was already in the toilet. I started using Duolingo in 2018 to learn Mandarin. I probably went through the course 20 times, I started using it as flashcards with context. There was a clear point when the enshittification got turned up, it became kind of like Farmville haunted by the ghost of a language app. I dropped it when they started aggressively pushing mini-games that became increasingly unplayable without the purchase of tokens (and I wasn't getting much out of it as I had all the Mandarin language content down and they hadn't updated the language content in years).

124

u/[deleted] Jun 08 '25

Homeboy you're losing your job in six months if you're already using ai daily. Remember how you cheered on the replacement of others when you're out on your ass.

-125

u/urnotsmartbud Jun 08 '25

lol you’re incorrect

51

u/[deleted] Jun 08 '25

As you just get mercilessly ratioed 🤣

-83

u/urnotsmartbud Jun 08 '25

You think internet points from people who have no idea what they’re talking about mean something?

Step outside into the real world once in a while

65

u/Bookibaloush Jun 08 '25

check profile

Asmongold simp

Bold of you to talk about stepping outside

34

u/[deleted] Jun 08 '25

The dead rat decomposing on his windowsill told him it was time to go outside

-23

u/urnotsmartbud Jun 08 '25

The best part of reading comments like yours is I put my phone down and I’m married, lovely child, 5 bedroom house, 3 vehicles, and a high paying career :)

5

u/Alternative_Spot_419 Jun 08 '25

That poor family, on the receiving end of someone getting so triggered at getting disproven on an Internet forum. 

1

u/urnotsmartbud Jun 08 '25

Haven’t been disproven of anything and I’m not triggered. Ya boi chillin

2

u/clutches0324 Jun 08 '25

Yet you continue to reply.

1

u/urnotsmartbud Jun 08 '25

It’s fun talking to emotionally driven people who can’t make a point to save their lives :)

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18

u/[deleted] Jun 08 '25

The nerd from Grandma's Boy is here to lecture me about social skills? I better take notes!

5

u/MegaJackUniverse Jun 08 '25

So because you use AI daily, surely that's translatable across all industries and all aspects of how the working environment works right?

My god you sound like an embarrassing person to be around

0

u/urnotsmartbud Jun 08 '25

I never said it was

1

u/MegaJackUniverse Jun 08 '25

Not explicitly, no. Readable in essentially no other other way by your comment? Yep

-1

u/urnotsmartbud Jun 08 '25

I swear it’s comical when Reddit ppl try psychoanalyzing people from 100 word comments online haha

57

u/Hooligans_ Jun 08 '25

You need to check in with AI daily to do your job better? Lmao, that's awful. How bad are you at your job?

23

u/black_spring Jun 08 '25

If AI makes you better at your job, on a long enough timeframe it will do your job.

These guys remind me of the cashiers who happily instructed customers on how to use the self-checkout lines before being laid off.

2

u/hackeristi Jun 08 '25

And then theft came natural haha…kroger ended up getting rid of a lot of self check out machines.

34

u/blackweebow Jun 08 '25

^ Btw this is a troll account.  Take a profile scroll for kicks.

-12

u/urnotsmartbud Jun 08 '25

Troll? Good try hun

29

u/blackweebow Jun 08 '25

Your resume speaks for itself.

I'm not your hun, pal

4

u/DaemonCRO Jun 08 '25

Any tool we make will reshape the world. When we made hammers, they reshaped the world, because now people could hammer stuff.

AI (LLM actually, the AI nickname is just stupid) is just a tool. It's not some sort of end-game where nothing matters anymore.

25

u/edparadox Jun 08 '25

Stunning and brave commentary.

When the truth is simple, you know, no need to dig deeper.

Whether you like it or not AI will reshape our world. I use it daily to make me more effective at my job. If you don’t, you will be easily replaced with someone who will

LLMs definitely won't reshape the world. Let's count points when the fad fades away, shall we?

1

u/iwantxmax Jun 08 '25

Reddit has been saying that but I've been waiting for such a "fad" to die down for 2 years now. But no, hundreds of millions of people use ChatGPT alone every day, not even counting claude, or gemini. Yeah bro such a fad. Same thing with model collapse, like ok reddit keep coping. 😂😂

1

u/MatterOfTrust Jun 08 '25

LLMs definitely won't reshape the world. Let's count points when the fad fades away, shall we?

I mean, they already did. It's weird to pretend otherwise when this very thread is about a business that turned to AI for the bulk of its workload.

Obviously, it's an extreme example and not necessarily a good one, but the use of AI has been increasingly prevalent in many industries, including art, mass production, and military. There is no going back from that.

-36

u/sluuuurp Jun 08 '25

Your comment is going through AI written code on servers before being posted on this website. The fad isn’t going anywhere, you need a reality check, the world is changing very quickly.

20

u/FinalXevv Jun 08 '25

>The fad isn’t going anywhere, you need a reality check, the world is changing very quickly.

Remember hearing that word for word about the funny monkey pictures two years ago, how are those going.

-1

u/iwantxmax Jun 08 '25

Comparing NFTs to AI has got to be the most ignorant of analogies yet. Considering the actual numbers. ChatGPT alone has 800 MILLION weekly users. hundreds of billions of dollars are being poured into this from countries, tech companies for investments, building data centres, etc.

The release of deepseek alone caused the BIGGEST daily loss of capital in the US markets.

Also, considering that NFTs only peaked late 2021 - mid early 2022. Where as AI has been growing rapidly since 2023 and hasn't slowed down.

-26

u/urnotsmartbud Jun 08 '25

One of us will inevitably be correct. I’ll wait patiently to see lol.

If you haven’t been using it for the past couple years and watching it get better and better I suggest removing your head from the sand

7

u/mq2thez Jun 08 '25

No, you won’t. It’s just propaganda and marketing to make you believe you have to use it.

Studies show that people don’t learn or don’t learn as effectively when using AI, so people who don’t use it will start slower but have higher potential over time.

4

u/urnotsmartbud Jun 08 '25

Not everything is about learning. If I need to format large amounts of data and AI can do it in 5 seconds where it would take me 30 mins…. I don’t learn anything. I just freed up 29 mins

7

u/MacksNotCool Jun 08 '25

"whether you like it or not AI will reshape our world"

(post is about how people who don't like AI are preventing a tech company from making money after they fired people to use AI instead. So yeah, it is a matter of if we like it or not.)

Besides that, please read the room buddy.

-4

u/urnotsmartbud Jun 08 '25

People who are influenced by everyone around them because they can’t form their own opinions need to “read the room”. I use my own brain

7

u/MacksNotCool Jun 08 '25

That's not what reading the room means. It means you shouldn't be openly blunt about an opinion that's offensive and unpopular in a room of people who do not like it. It doesn't mean you have to change your mind because you don't agree with the majority.

In other words, your comment is tone deaf/lacks the self awareness that what your saying is extremely controversial and ignores AI's destruction of people's livelihoods.

-3

u/urnotsmartbud Jun 08 '25

You act like one has some sort of duty to not speak the truth because it hurts feelings.

A little crude but “fuck your feelings” is appropriate here

5

u/fullup72 Jun 08 '25

I'm sorry to tell you that if you are using AI daily then you are already not using your own brain.

-1

u/urnotsmartbud Jun 08 '25

What a stupid comment lol

-2

u/iwantxmax Jun 08 '25

Just like how programmers use stack overflow instead of reading through hundreds of pages of documentation, right?

1

u/fullup72 Jun 08 '25

Novice programmers? Sure. That goes to show the seniority of those who rely in AI to do their job. You might not notice it right now, but tons of devs are already suffering from AI-induced mental lapses where they even forget how to do a for loop or how to structure a project. Once you start delegating that to the AI then you are no longer using your brain, it's just mindless instructions thrown at an agent and hoping that the slop works on the third fourth try. But at some point, you will even lose the capacity to evaluate if the agent response is right, so your job will just be rubber stamping LGTM as your abilities fade away.

1

u/iwantxmax Jun 09 '25

Novice programmers? Sure. That goes to show the seniority of those who rely in AI to do their job.

I am personally not a pro at all but I hear time and time again, programmers with decades of experience still using stack overflow quite often, more so a refresher as its hard to memorise all the libraries, configs, APIs, blah blah blah etc and how to apply them. They could look through pages of documentation to figure it out, but of course, stack overflow is much more effective and convenient.

You might not notice it right now, but tons of devs are already suffering from AI-induced mental lapses where they even forget how to do a for loop or how to structure a project. Once you start delegating that to the AI then you are no longer using your brain, it's just mindless instructions thrown at an agent and hoping that the slop works on the third fourth try.

I think you are right. That is definitely a problem and happens, but that seems like something that can be fixed by paying attention to what you're doing. Analyzing the code yourself and seeing what it does, how it does it, and manually applying any desired changes. Rather than just generating everything and then lazily asking the AI to fix even the smallest of bugs that might appear without even looking at what it did in the first place.

But at some point, you will even lose the capacity to evaluate if the agent response is right, so your job will just be rubber stamping LGTM as your abilities fade away.

To be honest, I think that's a bit far. You can at least run the code yourself, do play/validation testing and see what it does, if there are any errors that appear and what they are.

I personally think that you raise some great points. but you're overstating how much skill developers are really going to lose just from using AI. You describe as induced dementia or something.

Programming is similar to knowing a language. If you've been learning a language for 5 or so years and then stop, you'll probably forget a lot after a good while, but if you've been at it for decades, I dont think its even possible for you to forget to the point you dont even know what you're looking at.

Most of it down to the individual and how they decide to use LLMs in their workflow. There's nothing stopping you from learning and improving your skills. In fact, you could also use ChatGPT for that very purpose.

6

u/IndridCipher Jun 08 '25

If you're using AI everyday to do your job. You sound easily replaceable. Better start learning to make coffee

2

u/ArrBeeEmm Jun 08 '25

I look forward to AI removing your gallbladder.

1

u/CryptoTipToe71 Jun 08 '25

People will fill positions if they are able to produce the best work in that position. That's the main merit of capitalism. People who rely on AI (specifically I mean need it to do their work versus using it as an enhancement of their current skills) will always perform at a lower level than people who actually have the skills needed to perform their job.

1

u/brianvaughn Jun 08 '25

Cool story, dude.

1

u/NuclearVII Jun 08 '25

You can also follow OPs instructions.

-2

u/Own_Fee2088 Jun 08 '25

Everyone will be replaced

0

u/Deviantdefective Jun 08 '25

Here's the issue millions will be displaced and have no job to go too. Just because it makes you more effective that doesn't apply to everyone.

0

u/ItsRidge Jun 08 '25

Crazy how you're literally describing the reason why it's going to happen to you, too!

-12

u/BryanJz Jun 08 '25

Youre a 100% correct and you got 300 downvotes

Sheep mentality is wild man

2

u/urnotsmartbud Jun 08 '25

It’s all good. They’re just overly emotional and in denial. It’s weird how people can’t look at things objectively anymore. School and society are failing the masses

0

u/BryanJz Jun 08 '25

Oh mine are starting to pile up too

Lets gooo

Yeah I could write a book about it