Duolingo's CEO isn't alone in his AI-driven Heel Turn

Note: This is based on a post I put on LinkedIn on May 23, 2025. Sorry if you were one of the handful of people that read it there already. I did add a couple extra things as the story developed.

Duolingo’s CEO has been on a real heel turn lately.

The headline from this Fortune article is tough stuff floating around for a company that has a decent engineering and overall company culture (from what I’ve heard): “Duolingo CEO says AI is a better teacher than humans -- but schools will exist 'because you still need childcare' .”

I wrote a blog post about conscientious engineers being strongarmed into AI-driven work environments where I spend a couple paragraphs talking about Duolingo in general (based on the memo that went around about AI investment supplanting the roles of contractors). That includes a quick jab about how the exercises in the app sometimes come across as “a robot’s probabilistic understanding of what’s educational.” I think that’s the thing to be cautious of.

To reduce how teachers teach to something that can be mechanized and assume that generalized approaches to learning would work long term sounds exactly like a “hammer seeing everything as nails” situation. Of COURSE the Duolingo CEO thinks that you can teach everyone by showing them different ways to say “Your insects are on my plate” or whatever. His job is to think about that all the time.

School isn’t just for learning facts, though. It’s also for (and I would say mostly for) learning how to learn. Depending on AI to be able to context switch for a person’s individual learning style and to help kids understand how to structure advantageous learning environments for themselves seems ill-advised at best and dystopian at worst, given that we’re still dealing with hallucinations, sycophancy, and planet-killing resources required to run these models at scale¹.

I currently have a 1181-day streak on Duolingo, where I’ve attempted Spanish, Czech, Hawaiian, Music, and Romanian² but the tree (a term that has evolved over the years) that I’ve completed and continue to practice most is Italian. Do I speak or read Italian better now than I did at the beginning of that streak? Decidedly no. Am I really good at playing Duolingo the video game? Yep. Should learning feel more and more like a video game? Maybe not all the time.

The article does give some solace that the Duolingo CEO doesn’t think we’re going to turn this on overnight. But, first, we should probably ask if we should at all. Maybe, just like what most software engineers think about AI in their fields, we need to keep really smart teachers in the classroom, not to babysit, but to make sure the AI-assisted tooling doesn’t pretend to be a messiah or whatever.

UPDATE: Due to some pushback from everyone about CEOs en masse telling everyone that AI is going to replace people urgently, Luis von Ahn has teamed up with their unhinged social media department (their words) to dial back what he said about replacing workers, instead finding the compromise that AI will only certainly how we work fundamentally, not necessarily replace the need for humans. He publicized this both in another Fortune story and on the Duolingo TikTok . No word yet on if teachers are still to transition into childcare rather than education.

ANOTHER UPDATE: As of the writing of this post (5/25/2025), my Duolingo streak is 1184 days.

CEOs feeling the pushback?

That second Fortune story notes that Luis von Ahn is not alone in having to walk back comments where they said the thing they were thinking out loud. Specifically, the article cites Klarna and Shopify as having to walk back their celebrations of firing and not hiring when they realized saying that AI in its current state is better than humans is neither popular nor correct.

The fact that these companies were ready to say these things at all points to where the technology industry is in regards to capitalism and workers. Think of the numerous stories that have come out lately with competing headlines: workers think work sucks vs no one wants to work anymore ³. You have a growing number of people that don’t feel respected at work or feel like they’re a cog in a machine while, simultaneiously, business leaders are checking out AI’s fine behind and ignoring the human beings that do their bidding. It’s a growing rift verging on the size of income inequality.

The robots look cute from an exploitation level but CEOs ignore the essential need for all humans needed to maintain the future with AI. CEOs are known for being glib about the parts of their companies they don’t like to think about. There’s going to have to be some measured amount of “working together” at least in the short term, especially at these CEOs continue to step in it. It’s like the workers and the CEOs were like, “On the count to three, let’s say what will help our company at the same time. Ready? 1, 2, 3!” And then the workers said, “Better working conditions!” with the CEOs saying, “Getting rid of all of you and replacing you with simpleton robots!” Awkward. Hopefully that embarrassment will stem a total demolition of the work force by a few years.

I apologize if this post feels grossly anti-capitalist. It is eye-opening to see CEOs both fear for their lives after the United Healthcare guy was murdered (CEOs routinely have security detail or use their children to deter would-be assassins) but also don’t change any of their more toxic ways. It does feel like we’re at one of a series of inflection points when it comes to workers’ relationships with management.