- Duolingo’s founder and CEO Luis von Ahn believes there’s nothing a computer can’t teach—but says schools won’t go extinct because people need childcare. Speaking on the No Priors podcast, von Ahn said AI’s precision knowledge and tricks the company has learned about human motivation make a case for “scaling up” learning in a way that goes beyond humans.
Language-learning app Duolingo has been leaning heavily into AI. The company with an owl mascot temporarily replaced its CEO with an AI avatar on an earnings call last year—and evenmore controversially, it announced last month it would permanently replace its contract workers with AI.
Now the company has much broader ambitions. With a community of 116 million users a month, Duolingo has amassed loads of data about how people learn, accumulating tricks to keep learners engaged over the long term and even know how well a student will score on a test before they take it. According to founder and CEO Luis von Ahn, AI’s ability to individualize learning will lead to most teaching being done by computers in the next few decades.
“Ultimately, I’m not sure that there’s anything computers can’t really teach you,” von Ahn said on the No Priors podcast recently.
He predicted education would radically change, because “it’s just a lot more scalable to teach with AI than with teachers.”
“By the way, that doesn’t mean the teachers are going to go away, you still need people to take care of the students,” he added. “I also don’t think schools are going to go away, because you still need childcare.”
Host Sarah Guo jumped in to clarify. “In your view, schools could be childcare but everybody’s Duolingo-ing?” She said.
“I think it’s going to be something like that,” von Ahn replied.
The Duolingo model of teaching via quizzes and drills isn’t suitable for all subjects, he said, noting that history might be a subject better taught with “well-produced videos”—something AI can’t currently do well. But he said he believes the problem of scale tips the balance on the side of AI.
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’s CFO made similar comments last year, saying, “AI helps us replicate what a good teacher does”—things like helping a student “learn material, stay engaged, know where your weaknesses are, where your gaps are.”
Because Duolingo has acquired this data over many years and millions of users, the company has essentially run 16,000 A/B tests over its existence, von Ahn said. That means the app can deploy reminders at the time that a person is most likely to do a task, and devise exercises that are exactly the right amount of difficulty to keep students feeling accomplished and moving ahead.
Some schools are already leaning into AI. Newsweek recently profiled Alpha School, a chain of private K-12 schools where students learn for just two hours a day with the help of AI. There, guides—the school’s title for teachers—“provide motivational and emotional support rather than creating lesson plans, delivering lectures or grading assignments,” Newsweek wrote. With four locations and eight on the way, the school charges $40,000 to $65,000 a year in tuition, according to its website.
With President Donald Trump recently signing an executive order to promote AI education, manymore schools could be seeing the technology.
Von Ahn, at least, thinks the change won’t happen for some years.
“I don’t think you’ll see a change where next year everybody’s learning is completely different,” he said. When it comes to most education, “it’s like government—it’s just slow.”