As a teacher I can tell you it's clear this person is not very well educated, but also, the way the US Gov't has slowly defunded and de-prioritized education, we're very close to just being childcare right now.
This is what is really killing me. There are probably going to be cases where it looks like AI is saving the day, but only because our educational system was gutted beforehand. Our district is already on the "AI is here, so we better not get left behind!" train.
I teach at a tribal college, and I have very strict rules against AI use in my classes, regardless of what any other faculty choose to do in theirs. I will force my students to use a tiny corner of their brain if it's the last thing I do.
These self absorbed egomaniac “tech-bros”must not be allowed to gain power. Their tech ambitions need to be curbed and regulated. They are NOT interested in “the welfare of the people”!
Aside from the utter insult to teachers and willful misunderstanding of how learning works, this is the same line of thinking as Zuck telling us bots could replace a social life and friends.
I worked with techbros for years (some of who actually know Luis —the Duolingo CEO— personally). They are so deep into their "tech solves everything" cult they are unable to consider other human variables. The Silicon Valley reality distortion field.
The way he talks about AI having “very precise knowledge” suggests he knows nothing about how that works as well. AIs don’t “know” or understand anything - they just generate sentences based on the probability of word/letter order. It’s the literal opposite of knowing things.
What a miserable, lonely world these tech bros have envisioned for our future. If these guys can’t see the benefit of human interaction, it tells you all you need to know about them.
Duolingo sucks. Go to a school and learn from a teacher, who can teach you real life ways of speaking, and the cadence of a human,not a robot that sounds uncanny,and doesn't train your ear like you would from people. Even the videos on youtube with the bots,jump at you with the uncanny voice pattern
I do not accept the founder of Duolingo as an authority on education, because Duolingo sucks at teaching people things.
I accept him as an authority on getting people to waste time and money on (enjoyable) games that make them think they are learning. I 100% believe AI could be used for that.
1215 day streak on Duolingo for French. Yeah it’s not great if you’re serious about learning a language. It’s more akin to doing the daily crossword. They gave me a week free-trial to Duolingo MAX (the AI version of the app) and I did not particularly like it.
My 12 yo daughter caught three errors in her Spanish lesson yesterday. Tried to report it the chat bot claimed it was not an error. Glad we don't pay for it.
Ai isn't better if it's owned & controlled by money hungry fascists. 🤷♂️ Our problem isn't technology or our collective memorial heritage it's primitive reactionary fascists behind the wheel that's killing us.
I just want to know who keeps letting him near a microphone, because last time he spoke, the shitstorm was so huge Duolingo had to shut down their entire social media presence and scrape some sort of damage control (which is going poorly).
Right. These guys really do imagine a world where a handful of techbros will be doing the important, ‘skilled’ work managing the bots see. The ladies will go back to ‘unskilled’ tasks like childcare.
I teach adult international students. They certainly don’t need childcare, but they do need support, inspiration, confidence, and a host of human qualities. Teachers cannot be replaced by AI, but I suspect CEOs could.
I taught English in South Korea for ten years, and during that time the government repeatedly floated the subject of replacing human (foreign) English teachers with robot teachers in public schools. There were articles about it. They tested it out. They're still talking about it. And yet.
Even "...you still need childcare" is just a grudging placeholder until they can mandate that cloth mothers are illegal and the children must have wire mothers, and that indeed it is inevitable and the genie cannot be put back in the bottle, wire mothers are transformative and revolutionary.
Looking forward to the kids reminiscing about that inspiring AI that taught them history through ‘well produced videos’, such as how World War II ended in 2006 and how Napoleon took his name from a brand of French brandy
Language is a form of communication - and however much this dude may wish it, we can't actually communicate with bots. We can revise with them, which is mildly helpful. But my French teacher is great at answering my hundreds of questions, making contextual associations, and guiding me culturally.
None of us are forced to accept the technology they are selling. Let’s face it. We like the new toys. Since we are the parents and grandparents, it is up to us to say enough. It’s up to us to limit access for our children or grandkids.
So what I'm hearing is if you're trying to learn a second language absolutely don't use Duolingo! Apparently it's the worst possible option you could go with!
Fine. Duolingo is an utterly shit way to learn a language. It has as much to do with language acquisition as Minecraft has with the construction industry.
I'm thinking we bring back the good old-fashioned pillory.
While we have the CEO's rapt attention, we read them the mounting stack of studies that suggest the AI they're talking about is largely harmful...followed by a session of rotten tomatoes and manure.
If this was actually true that chatbots could replace actual educators, the wealthiest people would forgo fancy private schools for these chatbot apps.
my human teachers never reshuffled the lesson plan with no warning and then assumed i had learned a lot more than i had.
(speaking of what happened to me with their mandarin course right before the latest news about them and AI came out and i stopped using duolingo, anyway.)
If “it’s one teacher and like 30 students, each teacher cannot give individualized attention to each student,” he said. “But the computer can. And really, the computer can actually … have very precise knowledge about what you, what this one student is good at and bad at.”
#1. He's lying. All the research demonstrates that f2f in-person is the most effective for most learners.
#2. What a fucked-up take, even if it were true.
Yes. Let's ignore thousands of years of humans teaching other humans languages and say some tech that came out only a couple years ago is somehow superior without any further study or due diligence.
Also, where does he think the AI learned how to teach from?
Funnily enough, I think computers also don’t really value human beings and don’t understand how society operates. Therefore, they could be very effective CEOs.
Can someone please give this guy some shrooms or ayahuasca or something, so he can join the long list of techbros who for some reason needed psychedelics to realize that he's in fact surrounded by other human beings like him, not NPC's.
It does though. What you said sometimes happens too, though that's more of a stimulant related effect. Drugs work in mysterious ways. For me shrooms basically cured me of my ADHD caused academic underachievement for like a year or two.
No, I meant those guys in particular. I've also had transcendent experiences on shrooms, so I know they generally work that way, but they seem to make these CEOs even worse.
Huh. Why will people still need childcare? Presumably language learning won’t be the only jobs gobbled up by ai. We’ll all be at home (jk, we can’t afford homes) telling stories around the (virtually generated) fire
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
Upton Sinclair’s quote still as relevant 90 years later as it was when he first said it 🙄
I've always preferred the miller version: “For the man in the paddock...the supreme terror is the possibility of a world without horses. To tell him that it is disgusting to spend one’s life shoveling up hot turds is a piece of imbecility. A man can get to love shit if his livelihood depends on it”
I hate that funding and policies will be changed based on what von Ahn (and his ilk) "believes." How about some well-constructed studies before public resources are dumped on the latest tech train?
Defunding universities and the Dept. of Ed in favor of techbro vibes is beyond stupid.
Techbros shit out generative AI and think they know better than every educator in the country. Sounds like a typical male perspective. They think it can replace educators and that's all they need to give "replacing educators" a try.
CEOs have been champing at the bit to get rid of paid skilled labor for a long time but it’s a little surprising LLMs are what they’re willing to settle for
I'd bet a million dollars that Luis von Ahn couldn't tell the real books from the fake AI ones in the list that ran in the Chicago Sun-Times and Philly Inquirer.
My partner is a Spanish professor, and I’m doing Duolingo. There are so many instances where I will get it right and Duo will say I was wrong because they want a particular construction. Having a human teacher is measurably better than being graded by a robot.
This also sounds like my hatred for things like Grammarly. There are many different ways to assemble words in a given language while still being grammatically correct. It's called your personal writing style. Attempts to erase the wonderful variety of humanity should be violently opposed.
The answer to "How do you say ___?" is almost always "Like, eight different ways. You could say it this way, this way, or this way. This way isn't grammatically correct, but lots of people say it. Sometimes you hear this one used, but only in certain communities. Which do you prefer?"
Yes, I still remember when Duolingo marked an exercise of the Russian course as "wrong" because my sentence was just lacking the full stop at the end. As an app, it has improved over the years, but now it seems to be going backwards
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not that your apps actually teach people languages anyway
We can't adjust a lot of things about schools because that would mean kids being unsupervised during some hours of the day
Or if the school isn't open that day that means the kid doesn't get fed
I accept him as an authority on getting people to waste time and money on (enjoyable) games that make them think they are learning. I 100% believe AI could be used for that.
just incredible
While we have the CEO's rapt attention, we read them the mounting stack of studies that suggest the AI they're talking about is largely harmful...followed by a session of rotten tomatoes and manure.
(speaking of what happened to me with their mandarin course right before the latest news about them and AI came out and i stopped using duolingo, anyway.)
#2. What a fucked-up take, even if it were true.
Also, where does he think the AI learned how to teach from?
This guy is a fucking idiot.
Upton Sinclair’s quote still as relevant 90 years later as it was when he first said it 🙄
Defunding universities and the Dept. of Ed in favor of techbro vibes is beyond stupid.
Just because he made money with an APP,
he thinks he knows how education and learning works... 🤦🏼♀️🤦🏼♀️🤦🏼♀️
Free parenting.
Or from.
Especially when Duolingo insists on an English words order that, while technically permissible, feels significantly less natural.
I think a lot of these founders are torpedoing their companies bc they're bored.
Go start a new company and turn this one over to someone who believes in the mission.