The Exchanges

Q You've decided that you need to make it easier for normal humans who do not have, uh, infinite motivation to learn languages from computers. What was the first thing that you did that worked that like helped people get over the motivation hurdle of it being so boring?

A The first thing that we did that worked was making lessons, not 30 minutes long, but two minutes long. It makes a big difference. And it's not because people were spending less time. It's that Two minutes is amazing because at any point in time, you just think to yourself, oh, it's just two minutes. But the time investment for 30 minutes, you know, if you're right now and you're like, if I ask you, do you want to do something that takes 30 minutes? You're like, oh man, I don't know about that. Even though when you think the time investment is only going to be two minutes, you may spend the 30 minutes, but it's just, it's just like, yeah, I can start right now because I can end any time. So that's the first thing that worked. We did many other things that worked big, but that was the first thing that really was a big Big game changer.

AI assessment note: “The first thing that we did that worked was making lessons, not 30 minutes”

Q Chess now. Yes. How do you decide what Duolingo can teach beyond languages?

A What we're looking at for subjects to teach are, one, we're looking at very large audience. So we need something that hundreds of millions of people want to learn. There's a reason for that, and it's because we're an app at the end of the day, and we cannot charge 30,000 dollars To each user. We charge you 10 bucks. In order to make a significant amount of money from a new subject, it has to be learned by a lot of people. Otherwise, these very niche subjects just, you know, if we charge you 10 bucks and there's only a hundred people learning it, this is just not worth our time. Um, so they have to be, they have to be a large potential audience. Uh, the other thing is we look for things that take a long time to learn. Uh, you know, if you can learn something in two hours, you probably should just go watch a YouTube video and that does a perfectly good job. If it's just like two hours, we look for things that really take hundreds of hours to learn. Um, and then things that we think are, uh, are good for the world and we can do a good job with a mobile app. Oh, there's one extra thing, which is internally, we need to have somebody that's really excited about it. Um, so this has been true for all of these other subjects, you know, there's Somebody is very excited about music. Somebody is very excited about chess. And that, that's what has done it.

AI assessment note: “What we're looking at for subjects to teach are, one, we're looking at”

Q like, okay, learning is hard and, and like, there is no way around it. Like a smart friend of mine compared learning to like going to the gym, but for your mind, like, It's very simple. You just have to do it. And there's no other way besides like being willing to put the effort and think really hard about it. How do you react to that point of view?

A I would be very, very happy if everybody who is working on an education app thought that way, because then we will have no competitors. It just turns out that the hardest thing about learning is motivation. By the way, I believe that to be true of the gym too. You know, it's like a lot of people talk about, like, you can do, you can spend all your time debating whether an elliptical machine is better than a treadmill. But in the end, what matters is that you do it. Uh, that, that's like, 90% of what matters. Uh, it's the same with learning something. You know, you can spend all your time debating whether you should read that book or that, or this book, or whether you should do it through an app, or you should do it to a tutor. There, there's, of course, differences in how effective each of these are, but what matters the most is that you actually do it, and if you want to get people to actually do it, you have to make it as easy as possible to get started, to get in there, and to be motivated. I believe that is the reason why we have grown so much. I mean, and in fact, it's funny. I mean, we see a lot of, um, language learning apps that pop up that say, oh, we're like Duolingo, but without the gamification. And every time I see that, I'm like, great. You do that. Carry on. 99% of the world's population just is not that motivated for any activity. And, um, You know, there's the …

AI assessment note: “It just turns out that the hardest thing about learning is motivation.”

Q What else are you excited about in terms of, like, AI changing the product itself? Like role play and explain my answer and of these things. Like, what do you think matters or works so far?

A You know, I'm excited about, uh, generally practicing real world language, like conversation. I'm excited about that. Outside of language, I'm really excited about teaching math. We can do a much better job at teaching math with large language models, and we have a math course, um, but it is, it's, you know, we're completely retooling it, um, to be a lot more like a tutor. Now, you know, again, I'll go back to tutors. Tutors can be really good at kind of learning outcomes. They have this one big problem that they're really boring. So we're trying to find ways to make it a quote unquote tutor, but that is also gamified. Just turns out most people would rather play Candy Crush than sit there in front of a tutor. So we're trying to come up with something that is as effective as a tutor, but as fun as Candy Crush. The reality is we'll probably come up with something that is 90% as effective as a tutor and 90% as fun as Candy Crush, but at least the combo of this will be a lot more effective.

AI assessment note: “Outside of language, I'm really excited about teaching math.”

Q What do you know about how people learn that other, other humans don't, that you think is interesting?

A A lot of it is just codified on what the algorithms have adapted to. I mean, we have adaptive algorithms that try to figure out how to teach. And I think it's hard to verbalize a lot of it. I mean, we know a few things that are, that are, that you can verbalize, um, that, you know, may not be that surprising, but the farther your language is from your native language, the harder it is to learn. We have a model that can predict whether you're going to get an exercise right or wrong, and we're actually extremely accurate. So when we give you an exercise, we know if you're going to get it right or wrong. We're very accurate. Um, and the way, the way we do that is we just watch everything you're doing and we see what you're good at and what you're bad at. And for example, we know, we know for each user, this particular user is bad at the past tense. Um, one of the things you may think at first that the right thing to do is because this user is bad at the past tense, we should give them more past tense. And that's roughly true, but it's not exactly true because if all we did was give you lessons that Of things that you're bad at. These would be very, very, very horrible lessons for you. So there's a whole, uh, you know, I was going to say art, but it's actually more of a science. There's a more of a science about when to give you the things that you're bad at. And, and for example, …

AI assessment note: “the right thing to do is to give you an exercise that you're about 83%”

Q What's the drag force? I feel like that's actually a controversial point of view that it's going to be slow.

A Oh, go to a real school. They're doing stuff from like, 30 years ago. The drag, the drag is just, you know, it's like governments. It's just slow. If you live in, you know, New York or Silicon Valley, you'll see that, you know, there are schools that are doing really progressive stuff, et cetera, but the vast majority of the education system, it's very slow to make changes like this. School systems are, um, regulated, you know, in Texas, they're trying to not teach evolution. Like there's just weird stuff that goes on in school systems. So I think in general, it's going to take some time to do this. You probably will see some private schools, um, move there faster. There's also an interesting thing about private schools. They're very fancy private schools. You pay 50,000 bucks a year to go to a private school. It's hard for them to say, well, what our kids do is use Duolingo because it's like, well, why am I paying you 50,000 bucks? Um, so it's, so it's an interesting, you know, dynamics that's going to happen, but I do think that some of the private schools are probably going to be the first ones to start really kind of moving to tour towards this. And I think you'll just see a lot better learning outcomes, um, in general. Um, the other place where, where you may start seeing is there may be some countries that leapfrog, um, some countries that are at the moment, probably a li…

AI assessment note: “The drag, the drag is just, you know, it's like governments. It's just slow.”