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this post was submitted on 18 May 2025
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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Duolingo CEO says AI is a better teacher than humans—but schools will still exist ‘because you still need childcare’
It's wild for the CEO of an edutainment company to have this much disdain for for teachers.
Oh god, so many horror quotes in there.
...and that's why I try to avoid using smartphone apps as much as possible.
How about common sense..
Ugh. So terrible. Tech's obsession with "scaling" is one of the worst things about tech.
No, it cannot. It's a statistical model, it cannot give attention to anything or anyone, what are you talking about.
Did this person ever have a good teacher in their life
Aaaarrgh. Tech's obsession with A/B testing is another one of the worst things about tech.
Ok I stop here now, there's more, almost every paragraph contains something horrible.
Yeah that jumped out to me. Like human teaching has scaled fine to billions of people. It certainly has a better track record than Duolingo which provides meh study material and leads to ahem mixed learning outcomes despite being around for over a decade.
Of course there's the subtext of "but also we'll be able to put all those obsolete teachers out of business and make tons of money!"
Being in tech I definitely see misuse of A/B testing sometimes. Sometimes a team will ignore common sense entirely but come up with metrics that measure something irrelevant. The metrics are, intentionally or not, gamed to tell them what they want to hear. They then run the (useless) numbers and use that to justify why their change was good, even in the face of intense user backlash.
One particular example that just came to mind: someone made a bad change, and lots of people complained. Eventually the complaints started to peter out. Then they claimed "see! people just had to get used to it!" (versus the rather more obvious possibility that nobody bothered to complain more than once).
Not really. If schools aren't spending as much on teachers, they have more budget to spend on his slop. This way, he has a narrative for hitting the doubtlessly ridiculous future growth projections someone in his position is compelled to peddle.