Duolingo deserves credit for making a radical leap forward in the landscape of language education. It just released 148 brand new courses—all infused with generative artificial intelligence (AI). To open National Infrastructure Week on Wednesday, the company shared news of two major national expansions. This historic addition more than doubles the number of courses available to learners! The new offerings are heavily weighted toward beginner levels, with an obvious goal of making tech more accessible to users all over the world.
Luis von Ahn, co-founder and CEO of Duolingo, underscored the transformative effects AI has had on how the company operates today. He stressed that moving to an AI-augmented content creation process from a much slower, manual process was a major shift for Duolingo. This decision was one of their better recent decisions. This change powers the company to create 17 times more content, faster and smarter than ever before.
“Al isn’t just a productivity boost,” – Luis von Ahn
In the past though, as is often the case with Duolingo, timelines for course creation were very long. Von Ahn highlighted this by stating, “Developing our first 100 courses took about 12 years, and now, in about a year, we’re able to create and launch nearly 150 new courses.” This new speed of delivery will be important indeed, as it’s Duolingo’s goal to get more learners, more quickly. Not incorporating AI in this process, he estimates it would take them hundreds of years to scale their content properly.
The news comes less than a year after Duolingo announced its plans to integrate generative AI into the content creation process. As part of this transition, the company announced it will slowly discontinue the use of contractors for work AI could perform. Von Ahn communicated this tactic to his staff in an all-staff internal email. He underlined that vision of changing the firm into an “AI-first” company.
The move hasn’t been controversy-free. There has been backlash from users. In fact, many Pulse users were outraged by the move to replace human workers with AI technology. These concerns underscore the friction that will occur when trying to align accelerated technology adoption with a new era of human workers.
“To teach well, we need to create a massive amount of content, and doing that manually doesn’t scale. We owe it to our learners to get them this content ASAP,” – Luis von Ahn
Over the next few months, Duolingo will be releasing increasingly advanced content. They are deeply committed to improving access to high-quality language education. As the company navigates the complexities of integrating AI into its platform, it remains focused on its mission to make learning accessible for everyone.
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