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There’s a reason Duolingo’s meme-loving, sassy green owl has been blander lately.
Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn said the company has been playing it safe online after his post on mandatory AI usage received harsh social media backlash. The post outlined how Duolingo was going to mandate AI usage and use it as an indicator for hiring and performance review decisions.
“The most important thing is we wanted to make the sentiment on our social media positive,” von Ahn said on the company’s earnings call on Thursday. He added: “We still are not posting the extremely edgy things that are more likely to go viral.”
The Duolingo CEO said that “stopping edgy posts” helped turn social media sentiment positive. But he said the move may also have hurt the company’s daily active users in the quarter that ended in June.
Before the quarter, the company predicted 40% to 45% year-on-year growth in daily active users, an important metric for consumer tech companies. Von Ahn said Duolingo reported 40% growth — at the lower end of the range — because of the controlled social media engagement.
“The effect of that was essentially all in the United States, including Canada and stuff like that,” he said. “This impact is in the past.”
In an April memo to employees shared on LinkedIn, von Ahn outlined his plan to make the company “AI-first.” He wrote that AI fluency would determine who is hired and promoted at the company, and that Duolingo would stop hiring contractors for the work AI can handle. Von Ahn added that the AI push won’t replace full-time employees with the technology.
“We can’t wait until the technology is 100% perfect,” the CEO wrote in the memo. “We’d rather move with urgency and take occasional small hits on quality than move slowly and miss the moment.”
But the memo received an unforgiving fallout: Users posted concerns on X, TikTok, and Reddit that the company would let AI take jobs and that AI slop would spam their favorite language learning app. Duolingo, which has cultivated a big social presence, wiped its social accounts for a period.
“What I’ve learned as a leader is just don’t post on LinkedIn. I’m kidding,” von Ahn said on Wednesday. “What people understood from my message, which is not the intention, is that we just wanted to fire all our employees, which is not what we did and not what we want to do.”
He added that Duo’s signature posts will be coming back soon.
“We have recovered sentiment, but we are not taking as many risks because honestly, we’re skittish about it,” von Ahn said on Wednesday. “Over the next few weeks, I don’t know exactly how many weeks, weeks slash months, we’re going to be recovering or posting more edgy things that are more likely to go viral.”
For the second quarter, Duolingo reported a 41% revenue growth to $252.3 million and a record profitability of $44.8 million, growing 84% year over year.
Duolingo’s stock jumped nearly 19% after hours on Wednesday. Shares are up 113% in the past year on continued user growth and AI implementation.
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