Language-learning app Duolingo has become the latest company to publicly temper its AI enthusiasm after a series of bold proclamations on AI replacing humans garnered severe criticism.
He added, “No one is expected to navigate this shift alone. We’re developing workshops and advisory councils, and carving out dedicated experimentation time to help all our teams learn and adapt.”
Von Ahn also appeared to throw his weight behind AI over human teachers in a podcast appearance. Speaking on No Priors with Sarah Guo, he predicted that AI would soon be able to teach any subject, at a greater scale, and create “better learning outcomes” than human teachers, but added that schools would continue to exist “because you still need childcare.”
A Duolingo spokesperson told Fortune: “We’re still growing our team, and we’re training and developing our talent so they benefit from using AI.” He added, “All AI content is created under the direction and guidance of our learning experts. We have rigorous quality standards in place to ensure that any content we publish is safe, accurate and aligned with the CEFR,” referencing an international standard to measure language ability.
Duolingo’s self-correction is just the latest in a recent trend.
That “this tool that’s been adopted so fast, where the expectations are so high, [was] not making a difference in earnings was a surprise to me,” University of Chicago economics professor Anders Humlum, one of the NBER study authors, told Fortune.
“It seems it’s a much smaller and much slower transition than you might imagine if you had just studied the technology’s potential in a vacuum.”
