I hate this timeline so fucking much

tech ceo is an antisocial idiot cunt, news at 10

tbh i want this as a tattoo

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.

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”!

why tf are we learning languages if not to talk to people, Luis not that your apps actually teach people languages anyway

May his fields always lie fallow. And may failure and sorrow follow him always, until he turns from the path of fascist evisceration.

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.

That comes after the AI teaches us languages. We can speak them with our bot friends. No need for humans at all!

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.

them not letting their own kids have access to their products tells you all you need to know about them

I hate the ounce of truth to it though. 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

So far from where we should be.

Yep

We were forced by the pandemic to test this theory and it turned out that it was insanely and verifiably wrong.

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.

Duolingo MAX is also like double the price of Super (the basic paid subscription)

Duolingo is a terrible teacher already, so what does its CEO know?

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.

we're surrounded by assholes

Have we learned nothing from the movies?

He’s in a FB group I’m in and I finally had to block him because his willful disregard for common sense is infuriating.

Not to get too ad hominem, but I'm supposed to take advice from a guy with a dead rat on his chin?

I think that’s the alien parasite that controls his thoughts and actions

Duet?

I feel like he meant to say, "I am a terrible person," but somehow the words came out wrong.

Why are these people such psychopaths

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.

It's almost like there's laws requiring children to attend school...

And with that, im canceling my DuoLingo account

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.

Duolingo CEO can get wrecked.

duolingo eco again displaying how CEOs are mid-tier morons, to whom we feed cash as if they were eating sin

Ohmigod as if Duolingo is actually any good for learning an actual language in the first place

fucking absolutely braindead assertion hahahaha just incredible

Doesn't seem to mention whether he is using AI as the the first line teacher for his own children...

I think we’ll already know the answer to that one…

Tapping the sign for the nth time: education is a social process.

Not to mention that Duolingo is crap!

"Better" = "Less labor costs"

Guess what I am canceling.

pedagogy is 80% of the job.

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.

Wire mothers have a commanding market lead.

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

I’m not going to sit here and take education advice from anybody who thinks Duolingo is teaching people languages effectively.

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.

I’ll scream with you! Aaaahhhhhhhhhh!!!

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.

As a former teacher, I am screaming right there with you! This is total BS!

Bye bye Duolingo. Bye bye!

Luigi had the right idea for executives

it's always the ppl unqualified to teach that are making assumptions about what teachers do.

A million percent

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.)

That happened repeatedly with my partner and me even tho we were learning different languages

I thought we learned this was not true in 2020.

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.”

Duolingo is TRASH...It doesn't even do a good job of helping people become fluent in a different language 😂.

He likes the idea of AI teaching kids because a human teacher might question “you must love your tech overlords” as a lesson plan.

#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.

He must know that Duolingo is really shit at teaching you anything at all. Massive grifter. bsky.app/profile/crgn...

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? This guy is a fucking idiot.

well, i guess things could end up like The Diamond Age, that would be interesting at least

These assholes seem to think every job can be done by computers except theirs. FUCK this guy.

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.

AI that replaces only CEOs would be so much more cost effective

Fuck @duolingoesp.bsky.social deleting this app right now @duolingoverde.bsky.social

Teachers across the western world have got this message loud and clear.

Because rote memorization is the key to a successful education in 2025

"My last decision tanked the company. Here's why that might be a good thing."

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.

That's not what happens when they take psychedelics. The drugs enhance their egos.

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

Won't be telling stories, we'll have the AI generate "content"

📌🔥

CEO Luis von Ahn: welcome to our shitlist

Every time I think this can't get worse...

Why are all the psychopaths in charge. Fuck

Because they want to be, and we let them be

says the guy whose app taught me how to say ‘the elephant likes chocolate’ in my first greek lesson. useful.

“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.

Why should we listen to someone with a distorted perception of reality?

If Duolingo is so smart what can’t they get rid of that annoying bell?

I did just scream.

Context: I didn’t scream until after I read the article.

Go ahead, Duolingo, look down the barrel of that gun, see if the trigger works.

Precision knowledge, huh? 🙃

another white techbro douchebag being loud and wrong.

Jesus christ every day I'm more and more glad I left teaching last year. this is getting inane

I guess they don't need human subscribers then

Take the duolingo nerd to a school and give him a swirlie

Same. Just because he made money with an APP, he thinks he knows how education and learning works... 🤦🏼‍♀️🤦🏼‍♀️🤦🏼‍♀️

What a fucking dolt.

oh nooo

Maybe we need to bring back angry mobs with torches and pitchforks

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

He has to say this, he’s put all his money at the craps table on this bad hand and is stuck with it.

These tech idiots are a danger to society.

so glad i have an excuse to drop this incredibly annoying app. fuck that bird

I uninstalled the app just yesterday.

Tell me you don't have special needs kids without telling me you don't have special needs kids.

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.

Boycott

And onwards goes rentieer capitalism. They want everyone paying them monthly for some shitty service you can do without.

Maybe time to leave the app!

Yep. Free parenting. Or from.

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.

I love it when Duolingo marks my translation of the Spanish into English as wrong because of this. Um, hello! Native English speaker here!

Non. Fucking. Stop. Especially when Duolingo insists on an English words order that, while technically permissible, feels significantly less natural.

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

Fuck this man straight to hell.

No regrets on canceling the subscription and deleting the app. Bye bye, Birdie.

Anyone got an eye on their user numbers since he started screeching about AI? 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.

By his logic maybe the day that we don’t need human for childcare while AI taking over is not gonna be far away from now

considering how dogshit AI is, no it's a long, long way off

It’s hard to boycott what you weren’t gonna use anyway, but until this person is 6 feet under I’m not going anywhere near Duolingo

I am suddenly motivated to review all of the profanity I know in different languages.

anyone who says shit this genuinely abhorrent ought to be shot frankly

aaaahhh