Duolingo sinks in the stock market. In early June its action was around $ 525, but now its value It has collapsed Up to 325 dollars, 38%. It is not entirely clear what this debacle has caused, but we have a clear suspect: AI.
Be careful what you say. Three months ago Luis Von Ahn, CEO of Duolingo, made very controversial statements and indicated that he would replace part of his network of external (human) collaborators by generative AI systems. Although he stressed that they would continue to be a company that took great care to its employees, it also stressed that IA would take an increasingly notable role in the entire operation of the company, especially to “eliminate bottlenecks so we can do more” with the employees they already had.
The value of Duolingo’s action has suffered important ups and downs in what we have been, but the last trend is clearly negative. Source: Google Finance.
Boom and drop in actions. These statements were produced at the end of April. The initial impact for shares seemed to be positive, which went from $ 400 to $ 530 (32.5% growth) in a few days. But shortly after that optimism for the role of AI in the company vanished among investors: the action fell even below those initial levels, and now is around year principle levels.
It seemed that Duolingo traced. The company presented financial results and corroborated the success of its business model. The feeling of progress when learning a language – gamification is a powerful (and as we will see, dangerous) tool— sold more than learning itself. That allowed to momentarily stop the fall of the actions a few days ago, but then something happened.
GPT-5. During the presentation of the new OpenAI model there was a demonstration in which one of the company’s engineers launched a dart poisoned to Duolingo. That demo was to create a custom web application in just three minutes with which the user could learn French. With a simple prompt an app that competed directly with Duolingo, and that of course avoided paying for that application to learn languages.
That PROMPT single made GPT-5 capable of creating an interactive website to teach you to speak in French. Source: OpenAi.
Be careful with gamifying everything. Although that demo of GPT-5 becoming a personalized teacher is striking, the value of value of Duolingo’s action may also have been motivated by other causes. Especially, for that clear focus on the gamification of the learning process. Converting this process into a game is attractive and encourages many users to take that task in a more fun way, but criticism of excessive focus In Duolingo’s gamification they are frequent. As A user said In Reddit, “for me the reward to learn a language is to learn the language.” Other explained That Duolingo is not a learning application, but that it must be taken as something else: a game.
The condemnation of advertising. Other criticisms are aimed at Excessive appearance of ads advertising when one uses duolingo to learn a language. Advertising occurs in the free version, because the premium version has the advantage of not showing it. The model is reasonable – study, after all, is a company and is there to earn money – but as with streaming, the presence of ads is increasing and is increasingly annoying for those users of the free version.
Of betting on AI to be threatened by her. The truth is that although all these factors may have influenced that assessment, volatility may have been influenced by those expectations that are constantly lived with AI. The companies that are most committed to this technology are the ones that are going up in the stock market –to tell the “Trinity of the AI”-, although the real impact of this technology is for the very discreet moment.
AI as a private teacher. What is unquestionable is that The potential of AI as a teacher of any discipline “Not only about languages,” is undeniable. It is something that GPT-4o already pointed out, whose demonstrations were in the same direction. For example, the boy’s video Learning to solve a mathematical issue —Hahere included – it was especially striking, and hunting a future in which whoever wants to get a lot of these “private teachers” that we can create with a prompt single in chatgpt (and other chatbots, of course). It is early to know, of course, but Duolingo, like many others, seems to be suffering the consequences of that future potential.
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