How Much Can Duolingo Teach Us?

Interesting article about the Duolingo. Some top quotes related to AI:

Then, a week after I left Pittsburgh, Duolingo got a sneak preview of GPT-4, OpenAI’s new large-language model. It has been trained on far more data than its predecessor; for the first time, that data includes images as well as text. GPT-4 responds to language prompts with a dexterity that far surpasses that of its predecessor. When von Ahn saw what it was capable of, he scrapped the two programs involving human teachers. “It took me approximately one minute,” he told me later. “Within a day, we had re-formed a team to work exactly on this.”

Back in September, von Ahn told me that artificial intelligence would eventually make computers better teachers than people. He saw this as a positive development, since more people have access to smartphones than to high-quality education. “We’ve all gone to school,” he told me at one point. “Some teachers are good, but the vast majority are not all that great.” Humans, he told me on another occasion, “are just hard to deal with. You need a lot of human tutors, and they’re kind of hard to use, and we can’t get them for free. And I really want people to be able to learn for free.”