Most people never manage to turn their ideas into business successes. Luis von Ahn (Guatemala City, 1978) has achieved it twice. The first, when he created reCAPTCHA and sold it to Google in 2009 for a small fortune.
The second, years later, started from a much simpler concept. Learning languages was a painso von Ahn wanted to turn that into just the opposite: something fun. This is how it was born Duolingoa company that taught how to speak languages with a strong component of gamification.
You already had to go to an academy or spend long periods of time in online courses: you could learn words, phrases and pronunciation through small tests when you were on the bus or waiting in a queue.
Duolingo achieved the most difficult thing: making us like each other (and fall in love)
Learning with Duolingo was fun and comforting. The small rewards worked and turned it almost into a video game that little by little more people became fond of. The snowball got bigger and bigger and Duolingo became one of those companies that already seemed likeable at first.
It seemed that everything it did was done well, and little by little the company took important steps to become the giant it is today. The certifications arrived who wanted to rival the famous TOEFL exams, their platform for schools, and more and more languages. Some, like japanesewere a challenge. Others, like the Klingon or the high valyriumwere above all a diversion that consolidated the fun and cool image of the company.
Then things started to get interesting because Duolingo wanted to not only teach us languages to speak, but also programming languages. He was encouraged to want to serve as a tool so that the little ones They learned to read and write. And for the young and not so young, Duolingo wanted to become private mathematics teacherof music or even chess.
All of this ensured that over the years Duolingo managed to solidify that company image that Not only did he solve real problems, but he did it in a friendly, friendly and fun way.. In 2021 the company decided go public and after a couple of relatively calm years, the shares began to rise in value significantly. Everything seemed to be going great for the company.
And then everything went wrong.
AI has mortally wounded Duolingo, but not because of what we think
When OpenAI presented GPT-4o in June 2024, many of us saw the future. One in which you no longer typed on your computer or on your mobile screen: it was enough to talk to him.
That promised to transform many segments and kill some others, and among those threatened were companies like Duolingo. At the time it wasn’t so obvious, but when we saw that kid solving a math problem With the help of AI, it was not difficult to imagine that education, as we had known it, could have an expiration date.
Curiously, that didn’t seem to affect Duolingo too much. The company continued to grow, but then two things happened. First and foremost, a major blunder. Luis von Ahn advertisement in April an “AI First” vision in which I would bet on artificial intelligence as a new great tool for your growth. The message sounded like “let’s do without the human being,” and although von Ahn tried to clarify things, the damage was done.
After that, the debacle. Duolingo shares began to plummet. But the thing didn’t end there.
The second of those turning point events occurred in August, when GPT-5 demonstrated that one could build a custom Duolingo for, for example, learn french in a fun way. People stopped being in love with Duolingo and they began to criticize her precisely because of what had made her succeed. There was too much gamification and, as i said a user on Reddit, “for me the reward for learning a language is learning the language.”
Source: Cinco Días.
Stocks continued to fall almost steadily. These days Duolingo presented financial results, and the curious thing is that although they were good, they were not good enough for Wall Street.
The firm reached 135 million active monthly users (50 million use it daily), 20% more than in the same period of the previous year. It also rose 34% in paying users. Although one would think those numbers were fantastic, they also warned that the forecasts for the fourth quarter were not so optimistic. Result: new stock market debacle.
So much so that the shares have plummeted 64% since reaching their highs on May 1, just after the “AI First” announcement. Since then, Duolingo’s drift has been worrying, and the coming months will undoubtedly mark its future even more.
The company is in a difficult moment, and the rise of AI may end up causing those experimenting with their chatbot to realize that starting to learn languages is as easy as telling ChatGPT “I want to practice my English with you a little. Correct me when I say something else and suggest small exercises” out loud. That is the great challenge for Duolingo going forward.
In Xataka | How to practice languages using artificial intelligence
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