Duolingo's Stock Down 38%, Plummets After OpenAI's GPT-5 Language App-Building Demo (yahoo.com) 91
Duolingo's stock peaked at $529.05 on May 16th. Three months later, it's down 38% — with that drop starting shortly after backlash to the CEO's promise to make it an "AI-first" company.
Yet "The backlash against Duolingo going 'AI-first' didn't even matter," TechCrunch wrote August 7th, noting Duolingo's stock price surged almost 30% overnight. That surge vanished within two days — and instead of a 30% surge, Duolingo now shows a 5% drop over the last eight days.
Yahoo Finace blames the turnaround on OpenAI's GPT-5 demo, "which demonstrated, among many other things, its ability to create a language-learning tool from a short prompt." OpenAI researcher Yann Dubois asked the model to create an app to help his partner learn French. And in a few minutes GPT-5 churned out several iterations, with flashcards, a progress tracker, and even a simple snake-style game with a French twist, a mouse and cheese variation to learn new vocab....
[Duolingo's] corporate lawyers, of course, did warn against this in its annual 10-K, albeit in boilerplate language. Tucked into the risk factors section, Duolingo notes, "It is possible that a new product could gain rapid scale at the expense of existing brands through harnessing a new technology (such as generative AI)." Consider this another warning to anyone making software. [The article adds later that "Rapid development and fierce competition can leave firms suddenly behind — perceived as under threat, inferior, or obsolete — from every iteration of OpenAI's models and from the moves of other influential AI players..."]
There's also irony in the wild swings. Part of Duolingo's successful quarter stemmed from the business's efficient use of AI. Gross margins, the company said, outperformed management expectations due to lower AI costs. And AI conversational features have become part of the company's learning tools, helping achieve double-digit subscriber growth... But the enthusiasm for AI, which led to the initial stock bump this week, also led to the clawback. AI giveth and taketh away.
Meanwhile, this week a blog announced it was "able to activate a long-rumored Practice feature" hidden in Google Translate, notes PC Magazine, with the blogger even sharing a screen recording of "AI-led features within Translate" showing its ability to create personalized lessons. "Google's take on Duolingo is effectively ready for release," the Android Authority blog concluded. "Furthermore, the fact that a Telegram user spotted this in their app suggests that Google is already testing this in a limited fashion."
Duolingo's CEO revisited the backlash to his original "AI-first" promise today in a new interview today with the New York Times, emphasizing his hope that AI would only reduce the company's use of contractors. "We've never laid off any full-time employees. We don't plan to...." But: In the next five years, people's jobs will probably change. We're seeing it with many of our engineers. They may not be doing some rote tasks anymore. What will probably happen is that one person will be able to accomplish more, rather than having fewer people.
NYT: How are you managing that transition for employees?
Every Friday morning, we have this thing: It's a bad acronym, f-r-A-I-days. I don't know how to pronounce it. Those mornings, we let each team experiment on how to get more efficient to use A.I.
Yesterday there was also a new announcement from attorneys at Pomerantz LLP, which calls itself "the oldest law firm in the world dedicated to representing the rights of defrauded investors."
The firm announced it was investigating "whether Duolingo and certain of its officers and/or directors have engaged in securities fraud or other unlawful business practices."
Yet "The backlash against Duolingo going 'AI-first' didn't even matter," TechCrunch wrote August 7th, noting Duolingo's stock price surged almost 30% overnight. That surge vanished within two days — and instead of a 30% surge, Duolingo now shows a 5% drop over the last eight days.
Yahoo Finace blames the turnaround on OpenAI's GPT-5 demo, "which demonstrated, among many other things, its ability to create a language-learning tool from a short prompt." OpenAI researcher Yann Dubois asked the model to create an app to help his partner learn French. And in a few minutes GPT-5 churned out several iterations, with flashcards, a progress tracker, and even a simple snake-style game with a French twist, a mouse and cheese variation to learn new vocab....
[Duolingo's] corporate lawyers, of course, did warn against this in its annual 10-K, albeit in boilerplate language. Tucked into the risk factors section, Duolingo notes, "It is possible that a new product could gain rapid scale at the expense of existing brands through harnessing a new technology (such as generative AI)." Consider this another warning to anyone making software. [The article adds later that "Rapid development and fierce competition can leave firms suddenly behind — perceived as under threat, inferior, or obsolete — from every iteration of OpenAI's models and from the moves of other influential AI players..."]
There's also irony in the wild swings. Part of Duolingo's successful quarter stemmed from the business's efficient use of AI. Gross margins, the company said, outperformed management expectations due to lower AI costs. And AI conversational features have become part of the company's learning tools, helping achieve double-digit subscriber growth... But the enthusiasm for AI, which led to the initial stock bump this week, also led to the clawback. AI giveth and taketh away.
Meanwhile, this week a blog announced it was "able to activate a long-rumored Practice feature" hidden in Google Translate, notes PC Magazine, with the blogger even sharing a screen recording of "AI-led features within Translate" showing its ability to create personalized lessons. "Google's take on Duolingo is effectively ready for release," the Android Authority blog concluded. "Furthermore, the fact that a Telegram user spotted this in their app suggests that Google is already testing this in a limited fashion."
Duolingo's CEO revisited the backlash to his original "AI-first" promise today in a new interview today with the New York Times, emphasizing his hope that AI would only reduce the company's use of contractors. "We've never laid off any full-time employees. We don't plan to...." But: In the next five years, people's jobs will probably change. We're seeing it with many of our engineers. They may not be doing some rote tasks anymore. What will probably happen is that one person will be able to accomplish more, rather than having fewer people.
NYT: How are you managing that transition for employees?
Every Friday morning, we have this thing: It's a bad acronym, f-r-A-I-days. I don't know how to pronounce it. Those mornings, we let each team experiment on how to get more efficient to use A.I.
Yesterday there was also a new announcement from attorneys at Pomerantz LLP, which calls itself "the oldest law firm in the world dedicated to representing the rights of defrauded investors."
The firm announced it was investigating "whether Duolingo and certain of its officers and/or directors have engaged in securities fraud or other unlawful business practices."
You don't say. (Score:2)
What a shame.
Never mind.
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Just a week ago it was doing so well using AI.
https://news.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
Then suddenly this.
The AI is not the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The AI is not the problem (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know if AI is the problem, but Duolingo has awful language quality independent of upsell and gamification. Japanese might be a hard case because kanji have so many possible pronunciations, but a lot of the time the furigana don't match the audio. Other times, the audio playback has odd pronunciation, or the speech recognition doesn't pick up clearly enunciated morae.
And of course its focus on rote translation, with essentially zero explanation of grammar or usage, makes for poor proficiency.
Re: The AI is not the problem (Score:3)
Thereâ(TM)s a huge difference in quality between Duolingo language courses. The flagship Spanish and French courses have by far the most material, human made material at that including native speaker voice actors. In about two years of studying both languages I have got to the point where I can follow along TV shows and read simple materials which I consider reasonable payback for effort I donâ(TM)t feel I got much out of the German course which I took at the same time, however German is a distan
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I totally committed to the free Dutch course and I liked it until I grew to hate it due to meaningless, endless repetition I perceived only as existing to up-sell the paid version to me. While DuoLingo states language learning is their mission and I appreciate their need to be profitable, (or become a non-profit), I canceled out of frustration due to wasting sooo much time and energy time on inanely repetitive lessons. The phrase, "een wafel is beter dan drie boterham", will trigger me due to said repetitio
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however German is a distant third in course quantity and quality.
Going through German as a refresher, what I find very wrong about the way they teach it is when it comes to nouns... you would never learn it as Hund, Katze, or Kind (dog, cat, child)... you would learn der Hund, die Katze, or das Kind (the dog, the cat, the child) because you need to learn whether it's masculine, feminine, or neuter, otherwise you'll pick the wrong definite or indefinite articles in different situations.
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What does Duolingo actually do? The summary here doesn't say.
Re: The AI is not the problem (Score:3)
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Re: The AI is not the problem (Score:2)
That is not dead which can eternal lie
Nor that which can attract funding in perpetuity
And in strange aeons, even SoftBank may die
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They exist to serve ads and upsell. Learning? Not so much.
So what you're saying is you're too cheap to pay for the ad-free version? Just how else do you propose Duolingo make money?
Why? (Score:5, Informative)
If I have a device that that can reasonably translate between two languages, in real time, why do I need to learn other languages?
Re: Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
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When I was in Egypt, all I needed was "la shukran" (spelling?).
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A desire for self-improvement?
I can think of a thousand other ways I would seek out self-improvement besides learning another language. But maybe that's just me. I already have the ability to communicate in at least one language fairly well, so there are many other things I would rather learn than a parallel or alternative language to also communicate with.
Not to have a neon sign proclaiming you to be a tourist?
Just how many languages and countries are we talking about here? There are quite a lot. Unless we're talking about permanent residency, in which case you will learn the language faste
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There ARE decent arguments. Different languages facilitate different ways of thinking. (The weak form of the Whorf hypothesis. Pretty clearly true, just as the strong form is probably false.)
OTOH, you won't get that benefit from a quick course. It probably requires years of immersion.
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Sure. But at what opportunity cost?
The time to learn a new language, fluently, is significant. What else could you be doing with that time?
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The opportunity cost depends on your situation. I really should have devoted a bit of time to learning Japanese while I lived there, but instead I got along with a bare few phrases in Japanese, and usually using English. The opportunity cost would have been minimal.
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Considering most people watch TV every day for hours, I'd say learning a new language is definitely a better choice.
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Considering most people watch TV every day for hours, I'd say learning a new language is definitely a better choice.
actually, foreign language TV is a pretty good way to stay up on it. leave on sub-titles if you're out of practice.
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So, you want to compare entertainment to self-improvement?
Because, you know, it's not at all possible that when people watch tv, they're taking a mental break from all the other shit in their day, and just zoning out....and that time is available for intellectual activity, such as learning another language.
Yeah.
That makes sense.
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If the time is not available for intellectual or physical activity, it will be intellectual or physical decline instead. In this specific case it will be both.
Re: Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
A desire for self-improvement?
I can think of a thousand other ways I would seek out self-improvement besides learning another language. But maybe that's just me.
probably not just you, but the fact that you don't understand what's so special about learning other languages shows what you are missing out on here, quite common for monolinguals. as someone said "language is the straitjacket of thought". when you learn a new language you also learn a new way of thinking, of understanding, a new perspective of reality, you experience a different culture. this is liberating and fullfilling because it lets you step out of your old straitjacket, it makes it larger. the potential for self-improvement and expanding your mind is huge. ofc there are many other paths to self-improvement but learning a new language is a pretty good and healthy choice. any will do but try picking one that's fundamentally different form yours, and try to approach it with an open mind.
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I took two years of Russian in college. My wife told me to stop because she was tired of helping me with homework.
Re: Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Monolinguals don't understand it because they don't realise that it is perfectly possible to think in multiple languages, even at the same time. For them knowing a different language equals to translating.
Re: Why? (Score:2)
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Ahhh found the person who has only ever used it on their phone. No Duo has a world of detailed gramma lessons as well discussing complex sentence structure and provides pages of learning material for each lesson.
You just need to use their website instead.
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Right.
So consider the time it takes to just become fluent in one foreign language.
Now consider what else you could do with that same amount of time. Suppose, say, learning woodworking. Or reloading. Or vehicle repair. Or any number of equally fulfilling skills and activities.
People make different choices on how to spend their time.
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I can think of a thousand other ways I would seek out self-improvement besides learning another language. But maybe that's just me. I already have the ability to communicate in at least one language fairly well, so there are many other things I would rather learn than a parallel or alternative language to also communicate with.
Why learn anything at all then? You can look it all up.
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Why look it up? Pay someone else to do it for you.
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It's a thing, people want to do it. You wanting to do it or not, meaningless. Do enough people do it so that DuoLingo makes money? Yes they do.
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You're so anxious to dump your hate out in the open that you missed the point entirely.
I'm not the ONLY one who poses such a question. In fact, it's quite possible a lot of people do. So many people that it is entirely reasonable to expect a company like Duo will have less customers in the future, and possibly even less customers than that further into the future, and hey, entirely possible that the stock price might go down for such a reason.
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Maybe you're planning on staying overseas for a length of time and want to learn the language to communicate better?
If you're a tourist, a translation app might get you by. But if you're planning on a long term stay in say, France, learning a little French might not be a bad idea.
Limiting yourself to places that only speak English is somewhat limiting. And while English might be the language of business, plenty of business is conducted in other languages. It's not unheard of for suppliers to cheat Americans
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My question was why I need to learn other languages, not why does some other person somewhere need to.
Those are all great use cases you mention. None apply to me.
You also left out the best use case anyway: to try to impress the girl wearing the pants you're trying to get into.
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A desire for self-improvement?
There are many other ways to engage in self improvement.
Not to have a neon sign proclaiming you to be a tourist?
If I am a tourist, why should there be any shame in others knowing?
Wanting to show your hosts a modicum of respect?
Since when is not knowing the local language everywhere you go disrespectful?
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None of this stuff works with Chinese or Japanese books that aren't just technical books as an example. Especially chinese. AI also still struggles with Chinese a lot of the time when it's not just really basic.
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Because you may not have that device with you at the time. It's also makes for a lot more natural of a conversation.
But again, at what cost?
Many of the countries I've been to, I've been to only once, for a short period of time, and those languages are pretty much not used anywhere else. For example, Finland. Why the fuck would I devote the time required to become even remotely fluent in Finnish, instead of doing virtually anything else? Not to mention the effort required to stay fluent in a language that you never speak.
In my life, I've spent a year studying German, 2 years on French, 1 year on Latin, 2 years on Russia
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German and Russian, I'd agree with. I spent 5 years learning German in junior high and high school. I went to Germany and everyone spoke English. Everyone. The only times I've actually needed German was once in Spain where I was at a restaurant eating dinner with a group of people and one of them spoke German but didn't speak any English, so I had to come to the rescue. The other was a man lost, also in Spain, and I had to give him directions. English is so prevalent in Germany that I was in a small town on
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I'm all for people learning foreign languages. I wish I knew them all. I wish my child did. He gets Spanish and French classes every year, and he's going into 4th grade this year. I'm not anti-foreign-language (or whatever).
My comment was purely addressing the utility of having that skill, weighed against a technology-based alternative (and in the context of why Duo's stock price outlook may be less than rosy).
The thing is....how often is someone likely to need that other language, no matter how useful it m
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Boiling down that no paragraph wall of text, you've got:
1). Use case: Dealing with contractors.
2). Use case: Being able to respond when someone says naughty things about you in another language.
3). Use case: Helping someone who couldn't be bothered to learn English.
4). Maintaining fluency is easy.
5). Learning a Romance language is easy.
For most people, all three of your use cases are likely to not come up very often...and that second one? Why the fuck do I care if someone calls me an asshole (or whatever)
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Are you referring to me?
If you are.....let me see if I can remember every country I've been to.
Canada
U.S.
Mexico
Belize
Columbia
Panama
Costa Rica
Guatemala
Curaçao
Bahamas
Australia
Egypt
Sudan
Kenya
Tanzania
Sweden
Finland
Russia
Turkey
U.K.
Spain
Andorra
France
Germany
Czech Republic
Croatia
Slovenia
Austria
Slovakia
I might be forgetting some. If I spent the time to learn enough of the primary languages for all of those countries....fuck...I couldn't come up with that kind of time while holding down a full-time job, having a
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Who are you referring to?
If you're referring to me, you clearly have a reading comprehension issue.
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If I have a device that that can reasonably translate between two languages, in real time, why do I need to learn other languages?
If you just want to be a tourist and ask for a soda, then the translator is fine.
If you want to delve deep into the culture of of the place, then you need to speak the language. Language is the gateway to culture.
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Sure. Because that's what most people on a week, or two week if they're lucky, vacation once a year are doing. That great, big deep dive into culture.
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If I have a device...
But do you? Does your brain run low on battery? Break when you drop it? Do you think people think highly of you when you stop and use your phone just to do basic communication with them?
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If I have a device...
But do you? Does your brain run low on battery? Break when you drop it?
Seriously? This is what you're going with?
Do you think people think highly of you when you stop and use your phone just to do basic communication with them?
Beats me. Never been particular concerned with what complete strangers think of me. I'm certainly not going to be concerned what judgmental pricks think about me using a translation device.
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You might be traveling to a place where they don't all speak English. I was just on a two weeks trip around Europe and got to practice my secondary language skills in German, French, English and even a bit of Dutch/Flemish. I was never once taken for a one-language only arrogant tourist, but received a very good service everywhere. Can only recommend to pick up at least one secondary language.
Why are you people so concerned about someone knowing you're a tourist?
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Lost 8 months of gains (Score:3)
Of course it could still get worse. Or, it could get better. It started the year at $340, which is only 4% down on the year so far. (After more than doubling last year).
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I don't think it would take a half decent programmer more than a week to rewrite Duolingo's app. The content would be a little more work, but not that much. Tell the VCs a million dollars and we can rent a yacht, get some hookers and blow, and spend the leftovers on actually making the app.
Duolingo's market cap is 15 billion dollars. Whatever it's valued for, it ain't the app.
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Yeah, came here to say something similar: and not it's just language learning: How many of us could build a social media website in a week? Or a dating app?
Or a search engine for that matter? Maybe even a search engine that's more useful than Google's (AND matches, for example)?
I believe over the last few decades a lot of groups have managed to come up with operating systems that are significantly better than Windows. How's that coming along? Is Windows an also ran, replaced by open source alternatives, yet
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A search engine would be tougher. There's nothing terribly special about Google's algorithm, but there's a lot of capital invested in the crawling. What's App ($20 billion) was written by a guy from RentACoder.com though.
I think you underestimate the "people in power" i.e. institutional investors. The fact is, despite lots of tries, Windows, Google, Facebook, etc. don't get bumped off regularly. The app is not where their value is.
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Re:Queer stories (Score:4, Funny)
Who wants to fuck whom is not relevant to learning a language.
some would probably disagree!
Re:Queer stories (Score:5, Insightful)
Then why do you care? It obviously matters a lot for you "not to see it" which is exactly why it's a good idea that it is there.
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It was merely 2 people in a relationship.
In a multi-sexuality society, it makes sense to more or less pick them at random.
The fact is- you're offended by the existence of "queer" people, and too much of a pussy to admit it.
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Those chemicals may explain your asshole-level explainer here.
OTOH, homosexuality is very natural and normal, and has been part of the world for literally eons.
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Speak for yourself. The ability to speak a foreign language has always been a great pickup tool, and most people do very much go on tours overseas to fuck others. At least show that person the respect of being able to tell them you have a huge dong in their own language.
That is a hell of a lot of jobs (Score:2)
I can tell you it's not perfect yet though. It is stupidly obvious when Crunchyroll uses AI subs. The AI will also try to sub damn near anything text so that random background text will end up getting subtitled and obstructing everything.
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It's not clear to me, though, that GPT5 is good enough. OTOH, I'm going off second and third (or more) hand reports.
That said, there are already definite use cases, and those will only increase. The question is "how quickly?". I wouldn't want to play John Henry vs. the steam drill, but many seem anxious to do just that.
Automatic Language Growth may be better (Score:2)
Look here: https://beyondlanguagelearning... [beyondlang...arning.com]
Basically, the concept is that the best way to learn a language is the way you learned your first language as a baby.
Step 1: Spend months learning the language without speaking it. You only listen and watch other people speak it. You should not be trying to speak it or even thinking about it. his teaches you the actual words and sounds without letting you build in mistakes because you never try to say a word until you have heard it so many times you know the pr
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The data and experts agreed that essentially the only factory that matters in language acquisition is the total quantity of comprehensible input you receive. Wherever and however you get it, what matters is the total amount. All language learning methods or resources are valuable only to the extent that they facilitate you getting more comprehensible input in the target language.
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The reason you do not learn to read and write before you know how to pronounce is exactly because of what you describe.
Take Spanish. If you can speak English and learn to read Spanish and come across a word 'once' and you have not yet learned how to pronounce it, you will pronounce it
one-sus. Instead it is pronounced: on-se
Learning to read a language teaches you to mispronounce the words. Learn to speak it first and you can learn to read and write it later.
Their algorithms were mental (Score:2)
Trying to learn Italian I thought I was doing OK and after some success in buying metro tickets in Rome persevered with Duolingo until it started asking me to translate "the elephant is coming to lunch".
That's plain weird.
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So Italians do talk about the elephant in the room? :)
fickle investors (Score:2)