Duolingo announced On Wednesday, it beat its quarterly income estimates, although the company faced a widespread counterattack due to a choice to embrace generative AI over human workers. Duolingo Stock rose Almost 30% About the news.
In April, Director General Luis von Ahn divided That Duolingo would become a “AI-first” company, removing its use of contract workers. He also discouraged teams to hire more employees, unless the team is unable to automate more work. With the use of generative AI, Duolingo introduced 148 new language courses, more than double their previous bids.
“Without AI, it would take us decades to scale our content to more students,” Von Ahn wrote at the time. “We owe our students to get this ASAP content.”
While some Duolingo users have argued that these AI functions make the application worse, the company’s financial metrics tell a different history. Now, the company anticipates Earning more than $ 1 billion in revenue this year, and daily active users have grown 40% per year. The growth is significant, but falls in the lower range of the company’s estimates to grow between 40-45%, which investor brought to Von Ahn in Wednesday’s quarterly income.
“The reason we came [in] To the bottom end was because I said some things about AI, and I didn’t give enough context. Because of this, we received some reaction on social media, “Von Ahn said.” The most important thing is that we wanted to make the feeling on our social media positive. We stopped posting rough posts and started posting things that would make our feeling more positive. That worked. ”
On Tiktok, the main comments on Duolingo’s videos often remain criticisms of the company’s access. Snarky commentators will ask if videos with numerous people in them are made with AI, to which Duolingo will respond, “Well. Made by our great team!”
But even if public sentiment has changed to Duolingo, its bottom line is not … and from the company’s perspective, that is important.
