The Ledger
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Duolingo has retooled its entire content creation pipeline to be AI-based
“Over the last couple of years, what we did is we've retooled this whole content creation pipeline to be entirely based on large language models. I mean, it's all based on AI. So humans are not involved any longer, or very little, if at all.”
Generative AI reduces Duolingo artist production from one month to one day
“The artists are still here, but they are going so much faster. What artists could do before in like a month now, they can do in like a day. It's really unleashing their creativity because they're not spending their time on the mechanics of like, is this shadow…”
Founders' dislike of language learning helped them design for average users
“Neither of us likes learning languages. We actually are not language lovers. We don't like learning languages. And I think because of that, we made a Product that works for the average person, as opposed to for people who are obsessed with learning languages.”
Giving users an 83% success rate on exercises maximizes learner enjoyment
“Whenever we give you an exercise, the right thing to do is to give you an exercise that you're about 83% chance of getting it correct. Turns out that maximizes enjoyment.”
Luis von Ahn: Education will shift to AI instruction within 20 years
“First of all, I do think that education is going to change over the next, some number of years. I can't say one year, but it's probably less than 20 years. Some things are gonna change. And the reason for that is it's just a lot more scalable to teach with AI …”
Von Ahn: Developing countries may leapfrog legacy education systems using AI
“There may be some countries that leapfrog some countries that are at the moment, probably a little behind, you know, for them, this is the only way in which they can scale their education.”
Von Ahn: Duolingo is the world's most popular language learning method
“It's the most popular way to learn languages in the world.”
Two-minute lessons lower activation energy without reducing total time spent
“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…”
Duolingo has 10 million active users with 365+ day streaks
“We have ten million active users that have a streak longer than 365.”
Notifying inactive users that Duolingo is giving up effectively drives reactivation
“So we started sending this notification the fifth day that said, these reminders don't seem to be working. We're going to stop sending them for now. It turns out this is very powerful at getting people to come back because they feel like we've given up on them…”
Von Ahn: Learning Spanish takes an English speaker about 500 hours
“Turns out for an English speaker, getting to a pretty good spot in Spanish takes about 500 hours.”
Von Ahn: Learning Chinese takes an English speaker 2,000 hours
“And by the way, that same number for Chinese is 2000 hours.”
Duolingo's education mission gives it public leeway for risky marketing
“I think it also helps us that we're an education company because, you know, ultimately education, you can't really say that education is bad. It's hard to argue against education. So that allows us to, that allows our marketing to do things where we can't be c…”
Von Ahn: About two billion people worldwide are learning English
“In, in most countries in the world knowledge of English increases your income potential. And there's like two billion people in the world learning English.”
Luis von Ahn: Duolingo Teaches 40 Languages From Every Base Language
“At this point, we basically teach the 40 languages to every base language. And we're, that's a major increase in the number of courses.”
Von Ahn: Duolingo is retooling its math course to act like an LLM tutor
“We can do a much better job at teaching math with large language models, and we have a math course but it is, it's, you know, we're completely retooling it to be a lot more like a tutor.”
Von Ahn Was Initially Against Duolingo Mascot TikToks
“And I actually was against it. I'm like, I don't know if anybody's going to be interested in this.”
Luis von Ahn: Duolingo models accurately predict user exercise success
“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.”