Duolingo has millions of Indian users, but has a salary of less than 1%: Luis von Ahn, CEO and Co-founder

The next time you perform a user verification test on your website, you can blame someone when you refuse to believe you are human: Luis von Ahnthe inventor of Captcha. Arguably the person behind one of the most “annoying” things on the internet, but he smiled but disagreed: “The dock is annoying, but there may be more annoying things” – Von Ahn's career was out of defiance of expectations. He developed Captcha as a graduate student and handed it to Yahoo for free before continuing to teach computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. Von Ahn won the “genius” of MacArthur at the age of 28, and later founded recaptcha and sold it to Google, where he also worked. Then he got rid of everything and exchanged the most reliable bets in the tech world for a risky idea: learning a language can be as addictive as checking a phone. That gambling became Duolingo, a gamified language learning app he launched in 2012 and currently has more than 130 million active users per month. In with waitCEO and co-founder of Nasdaq-listed Duolingo talked about why the Indian market was tougher than expected, and AI kept him up at night. Editing excerpt:How big is the business in India?
As far as users are concerned, this is our fifth largest country and is growing a lot. We have millions of monthly active users. But in terms of revenue, it hasn't. In India, there is really no desire to pay for the app. Globally, we pay 9% of our monthly active users to remove ads. In India, the percentage is well below 1%.Do you have a strategy to make Indian users pay?
No, but if you have a good idea, please let me know! (laugh)

I'm from Guatemala, a relatively poor country where people do their best not to pay: they can watch it

10 consecutive ads are just to avoid payment. This will change over time and people will be more apt to subscribe to digitally. But at present, we have geographical locations with low per capita GDP, and these geographical locations are not paid. This is because our free version is good, we have about 12 markets, and we should note that India is one of them. We are having an enduring view with India. We hope that over time we will be able to make a profit here.How do you bring nuances like irony, humor, etc. when teaching a language, what does large language model (LLM) do in it?
If you are a beginner, you won't understand humor or irony – you're mainly trying to figure out what the word “Hello” is. For more advanced users, we do come up with these things.

Historically, computers are not very good. But in the past two years, using LLM, computers have been as good as humans in all these aspects – comics, poetry, rhymes, etc. At this point, all our modules are made by computers, and it is as good as human teachers.

AI and LLM like Chatgpt are developing at a speed, and they will soon become a game….
LLM is already very good at teaching you a language. For example, you can learn a language through ChatGpt. But that doesn't make us compete. The reality is that you can learn a language with books. In fact, you can learn anything from books, or even from quantum physics. What’s unique about Duolingo is that we are very good at keeping people engaged. That's the difficult part.

Skeptics say duolingo is just a good basic point, which won't actually help you learn a language. For example, I approached a 2,000-day winning streak in a French course, but I hardly spoke this language….
We have data to prove Duolingo is effective. The problem is that learning a language takes a long time: you need to spend 500 or 1,000 hours. So even with a 2,000-day streak, if you only spend three minutes a day, you won't cut it. You just need to take the time.

After the Kremlin warns, you have to delete all LGBTQ references in Russia recently. We are seeing something similar in the United States now, with many companies backing down on DEI policies after Trump. Will we see any such changes in Duolingo?
No, our values ​​will remain the same. In certain geographical locations, it is illegal to do something, and of course, we will follow the local laws of every country we operate. In the United States, I hope there will be no law that changes anything like this type of thing. We will continue to be our people as our company.

How AI is developing, have you seen people learn languages ​​from now on?
I think so. Look, it's hard to know what will happen in the future, but most of our users belong to two big buckets. Half of them are learning a language as a hobby. For example, AI will not change afterwards because it is like playing chess. Computers have been better than humans since 1997, but people still learn and play chess. Our other half of users are learning English to improve their skills. I don't think this will go away anytime soon, either.

Which barrel did the Indians fall into? The second one?
They mainly learn English, yes.

What makes you most afraid of AI?
unknown. We are undergoing a major shift and I don't know what will happen on the other side. This may just end up being a very useful tool, or it may end up taking over everyone’s job. The positive solution is that AI will only help us, so we can do everything we want and hand over unpleasant tasks to AI. The negative situation is that it is very likely that poor countries will eventually lose a lot of income sources and they do not have enough support. It's really hard to say what will happen, and for me, it's the terrible part.