Simon Willison's Weblog: duolingo

Luis von Ahn on LinkedIn

2025-05-26T19:14:49+00:00

Last month's Duolingo memo about becoming an "AI-first" company has seen significant backlash, particularly on TikTok. I've had trouble figuring out how much of this is a real threat to their business as opposed to protests from a loud minority, but it's clearly serious enough for Luis von Ahn to post another memo on LinkedIn:

One of the most important things leaders can do is provide clarity. When I released my AI memo a few weeks ago, I didn’t do that well. [...]

To be clear: I do not see AI as replacing what our employees do (we are in fact continuing to hire at the same speed as before). I see it as a tool to accelerate what we do, at the same or better level of quality. And the sooner we learn how to use it, and use it responsibly, the better off we will be in the long run.

My goal is for Duos to feel empowered and prepared to use this technology. No one is expected to navigate this shift alone. We’re developing workshops and advisory councils, and carving out dedicated experimentation time to help all our teams learn and adapt. [...]

This really isn't saying very much to be honest.

As a consumer-focused company with a passionate user-base I think Duolingo may turn into a useful canary for figuring out quite how damaging AI-backlash can be.

Via Hacker News

Tags: ai, generative-ai, tiktok, ai-ethics, duolingo

Quoting Luis von Ahn

2025-04-28T19:48:37+00:00

Betting on mobile made all the difference. We're making a similar call now, and this time the platform shift is AI.

AI isn't just a productivity boost. It helps us get closer to our mission. To teach well, we need to create a massive amount of content, and doing that manually doesn't scale. One of the best decisions we made recently was replacing a slow, manual content creation process with one powered by AI. Without AI, it would take us decades to scale our content to more learners. We owe it to our learners to get them this content ASAP. [...]

We'll be rolling out a few constructive constraints to help guide this shift:

We'll gradually stop using contractors to do work that AI can handle

AI use will be part of what we look for in hiring

AI use will be part of what we evaluate in performance reviews

Headcount will only be given if a team cannot automate more of their work

Most functions will have specific initiatives to fundamentally change how they work [...]

— Luis von Ahn, Duolingo all-hands memo, shared on LinkedIn

Tags: careers, ai, generative-ai, ai-ethics, duolingo

Tom Scott, and the formidable power of escalating streaks

2024-01-02T20:32:08+00:00

Ten years ago yesterday, Tom Scott posted this video to YouTube about "Special Crossings For Horses In Britain". It was the first in his Things You Might Not Know series, but more importantly it was the start of a streak.

Tom maintained a streak of posting a video approximately once a week for the next ten years.

Yesterday, he ended that streak with After ten years, it's time to stop making videos. He's not done with YouTube, but he's no longer holding himself to that intimidating weekly schedule.

I strongly recommend watching his final video. There's a moment when you realize what he's up to in it which is quite delightful.

I've known Tom for a long time. I made an appearance in the 11th "Things You Might Not Know" video, A Zeppelin, A Cat, and The World's First In-Flight Radio Message, two weeks into his streak (he was doing one a day at first), filmed at our leaving-the-UK-for-the-USA party in January 2014.

Watching from afar has been somewhat surreal. I didn't watch every video, but every now and then I'd see that Tom was flying with the Red Arrows, or visiting yet another nuclear reactor site, or overcoming his fear of rollercoasters. And then I'd notice that he'd picked up another million subscribers.

Hanging out with Tom was fun because he would inevitably be recognised by someone. 6.3 million subscribers is a lot of people!

Tom's success on YouTube comes down to a whole bunch of different factors. He was already a talented public speaker, a skilled researcher, had a brief stint as TV presenter and deep understanding of the viral internet.

Experienced YouTubers will tell you that frequency is key to success on that platform. YouTube's audience (and maybe their opaque algorithm) rewards consistency: publishing regularly is a crucial part of building an audience.

Tom is also incredibly conscientious about the content he produces. Take a look at his corrections and clarifications page to see how much effort he puts into getting things right: 25 detailed corrections across over 500 videos. See also his recent video Every mistake I've made since 2014.

His most significant correction became a whole new video clarifying how London fire brigades handled uninsured buildings in the 18th century, backed by two weeks of paid research by an archives and heritage research consultant. His commitment to accessibility is inspiring as well.

And then there was the streak.

Escalating streaks

The best way to get really good at anything is to do that thing on a regular basis, thoughtfully, and with the goal of doing it slightly better every time.

Tom's streak publishing a video to YouTube once a week for ten years is the single best illustration I've ever seen of that principle in action.

His initial videos were interesting, educational and had his signature enthusiastic energy, but they weren't exactly high budget affairs.

As he iterated on the format, he started to figure out what worked. His scripts got tighter, his research deeper and he started working with professionals to improve his production values.

He also learned to use his growing audience to gain access to a dizzying array of fascinating locations, experts and experiences.

The amount of work he invested in this project is staggering. The research, logistics, travel, writing, filming, editing and community management involved are hard for me to even comprehend.

The end result is something truly extraordinary. What a legacy! That final video has over 42,000 comments already, overwhelmingly thankful and positive.

Streaks can be insidious

In Tom's closing video he says:

So now it’s time to take a breather. I can’t keep this up. This is my dream job, and I have a lot of fun doing it. I know I’m incredibly lucky. But a dream job is still a job. And it’s a job that keeps getting bigger and more complicated and I am so tired! There’s nothing in my life right now except work. I did get close to burning out, but fortunately I always knew when to step back from the brink.

Streaks are a powerful psychological tool. Once Tom got to nine years, there was no way he wasn't going to push through to ten. I'm glad for his sake that in hitting that final milestone he's finally able to take a break!

My own experience with streaks

I've found great benefit from streaks myself. I'm on day 1,826 (that's 5 years yesterday) of a Duolingo streak, primarily learning Spanish. It's kind of working - from an investment of less than 15 minutes a day I'm now able to understand ~90% of news articles written in that language.

There are certainly more effective ways to learn a language, but I've tried different approaches in the past and nothing ever stuck for me to the point that I made real progress.

It turns out the streak mechanism was exactly what I needed. That tiny piece of effort, repeated every day over multiple years, really does add up.

I'm also 172 entries into my streak of publishing weeknotes - not-quite-weekly (more at-least-monthly) posts about what I've been doing, which I use mainly as an accountability tool to keep myself on track despite working independently without any form of boss.

A few years ago I started a website about tiny museums I have been to. I used streak pressure to bootstrap the site: I added a museum once a day for a hundred days, digging through old photos and memories.

My streaks are noway near the same league as Tom's. That's why I introduced the term escalating streaks earlier in this post - to emphasize that the true magic comes when you mindfully improve with every iteration.

I did however notice that by the end of my 100 day museum streak I was writing significantly higher quality articles than when I first started.

Flexibility and forgiveness is crucial

Streaks have multiple dangers. At one extreme, they can take over your life, forcing you to leave home behind and spend a decade traveling the world making increasingly brilliant YouTube videos.

The other challenge is what happens when you accidentally break them.

In the past, I've tried my hand at strict streaks... and then found that 100 days in I miss a day, and suddenly I'm reset to zero and I lose all motivation to continue.

The solution here is to build in some flexibility. I started a new streak recently to reply to at least one email every day, to encourage me to spend more time in my inbox. My goal for this is four out of seven days, so I can miss three days a week and still keep the streak going.

Duolingo has a "streak freeze" mechanism which can be used to forgive the occasional mishap, which I'm happy to take advantage of.

Initially I felt like this was "cheating", but it really isn't. Streaks are a powerful motivational tool if you figure out the best way to apply them.

The Tom Scott Streak

Three of my biggest inspirations in life are these:

The movie Into the Spider-Verse, demonstrating what happens when a group of creative people get together, rewrite the rules and elevate the quality bar for an entire industry.
Tom Holland's "Umbrella" performance on Lip Sync Battle, showing what happens when someone takes an opportunity and executes it with such skill, enthusiasm and panache that people are still talking about it six years later.
Ray Bandar's Basement Full of Skulls, a 60-year project resulting in 7,000+ meticulously preserved animal skulls, leading me to ask "what's MY basement full of skulls going to be?"

Today I'm adding a fourth thing to that list: the Tom Scott Streak.

Tags: inspiring, productivity, tom-scott, youtube, streaks, duolingo

Weeknotes: Niche Museums, Kepler, Trees and Streaks

2019-10-28T22:42:10+00:00

Niche Museums

Every now and then someone will ask “so when are you going to build Museums Near Me then?”, based on my obsession with niche museums and websites like www.owlsnearme.com.

For my Strategic Communications course at Stanford last week I had to perform a midterm presentation - a six minute talk to convince my audience of something, accompanied by slides and a handout.

I chose “you should seek out and explore tiny museums” as my topic, and used it as an excuse to finally start the website!

www.niche-museums.com is the result. It’s a small but growing collection of niche museums (17 so far, mostly in the San Francisco Bay Area) complete with the all important blue “Use my location” button to see museums near you.

Naturally I built it on Datasette. I’ll be writing more about the implementation (and releasing the underlying code) soon. I also built a new plugin for it, datasette-haversine.

Mapping museums against Starbucks

I needed a way to emphasize quite how many tiny museums there are in the USA. I decided to do this with a visualization.

It turns out there are 15,891 branches of Starbucks in the USA… and at least 30,132 museums!

I made these maps using a couple of sources.

All The Places is a crowdsourced scraper project which aims to build scrapers for every company that has a “store locator” area of their website. Starbucks has a store locator and All The Places have a scraper for it, so you can download GeoJSON of every Starbucks. I wrote a quick script to import that GeoJSON into Datasette using sqlite-utils.

The Institute of Museum and Library Services is an independent agency of the federal government that supports museums and libraries across the country. They publish a dataset of Museums in the USA as a set of CSV files. I used csvs-to-sqlite to load those into Datasette, than ran a union query to combine the three files together.

So I have Datasette instances (with a CSV export feature) for both Starbucks and USA museums, with altitudes and longitudes for each.

Now how to turn that into a map?

I turned to my new favourite GIS tool, Kepler. Kepler is an open source GIS visualization tool released by Uber, based on WebGL. It’s astonishingly powerful and can be used directly in your browser by clicking the “Get Started” button on their website (which I assumed would take you to installation instructions, but no, it loads up the entire tool in your browser).

You can import millions of points of data into Kepler and it will visualize them for you directly. I used a Datasette query to export the CSVs, then loaded in my Starbucks CSV, exported an image, loaded in the Museums CSV as a separate colour and exported a second image. The whole project ended up taking about 15 minutes. Kepler is a great addition to the toolbelt!

Animating the PG&E outages

My PG&E outages scraper continues to record a snapshot of the PG&E outage map JSON every ten minutes. I’m posting updates to a thread on Twitter, but discovering Kepler inspired me to look at more sophisticated visualization options.

This tutorial by Giuseppe Macrì tipped me off the the fact that you can use Kepler to animate points against timestamps!

Here’s the result: a video animation showing how PG&E’s outages have evolved since the 5th of October:

Here's a video animation of PG&E's outages from October 5th up until just a few minutes ago pic.twitter.com/50K3BrROZR
- Simon Willison (@simonw) October 28, 2019

Hayes Valley Trees

The city announced plans to cut down 27 ficus trees in our neighborhood in San Francisco. I’ve been working with Natalie to help a small group of citizens organize an appeal, and this weekend I helped run a survey of the affected trees (recording their exact locations in a CSV file) and then built www.hayes-valley-trees.com (source on GitHub) to link to from fliers attached to each affected tree.

It started out as a Datasette (running on Glitch) but since it’s only 27 data points I ended up freezing the data in a static JSON file to avoid having to tolerate any cold start times. The site is deployed as static assets on Zeit Now using their handy GitHub continuous deployment tool.

Streaks

It turns out I’m very motivated by streaks: I’m at 342 days for Duolingo Spanish and 603 days for an Apple Watch move streak. Could I apply this to other things in my life?

I asked on Twitter and was recommended the Streaks iOS app. It’s beautiful! I’m now tracking streaks for guitar practice, Duolingo, checking email, checking Slack, reading some books and adding a new museum to www.niche-museums.com (if I add one a day I can get from 17 museums today to 382 in a year!)

It seems to be working pretty well so far. I particularly like their iPhone widget.

Tags: museums, productivity, projects, visualization, weeknotes, baked-data, streaks, duolingo

Is there an application like Duolingo, but for math?

2013-12-15T12:37:00+00:00

My answer to Is there an application like Duolingo, but for math? on Quora

Khan Academy have a points, levels and achievements system for mathematics that is similar to the method used by duolingo.

Tags: android, programming, quora, duolingo

What are some productive things to do for 15 minutes a day?

2013-01-15T13:25:00+00:00

My answer to What are some productive things to do for 15 minutes a day? on Quora

Learn a foreign language - using DuoLingo on the iPhone, or with podcasts such as Coffee Break Spanish.

Tags: productivity, quora, duolingo

Are there any sites like CodeAcademy for other fields, i.e. who specialize in math, languages, finance, etc. (no "generalists" like Khan)?

2013-01-08T13:37:00+00:00

My answer to Are there any sites like CodeAcademy for other fields, i.e. who specialize in math, languages, finance, etc. (no "generalists" like Khan)? on Quora

Khan Academy is the most famous - it has over 3,000 videos covering topics from maths and science to economics and history. It's aimed at kids but I know of plenty of adults who learn from there as well. It's also a non-profit, and all of the content is completely free.

For language learning my wife has been having a really good time with Duolingo - she uses the iPhone app but they have a web version as well. It's also free - I think their business model revolves around getting students to crowdsource translations as part of their learning exercises.

Tags: startups, quora, duolingo