Hacker: Many edtech companies are 'homework cheating' businesses hit by ChatGPT
Severin Hacker · Duolingo Co-Founder, Severin Hacker: How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · May 19, 2025 · at 29:13
Severin Hacker is the co-founder and CTO of Duolingo. Responding to concerns about OpenAI threatening education platforms, Hacker argues that ChatGPT primarily disrupted companies whose product was facilitating homework cheating rather than genuine learning.
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“When ChatGPT came out, one of the first killer use cases for it was homework cheating, for the lack of a better term, okay? So if you were in the homework cheating business, That was devastating. That was really bad. So, so some of our, I'm not going to name them, but like some of the other companies in, you know, they call themselves education, but they're really more like in the homework cheating business.”
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