-but schools will still exist ‘because you still need childcare’

Language-learning app Duolingo has been leaning heavily into AI. The company with an owl mascot temporarily replaced its CEO with an AI avatar on an earnings call last year—and evenmore controversially, it announced last month it would permanently replace its contract workers with AI.

Now the company has much broader ambitions. With a community of 116 million users a month, Duolingo has amassed loads of data about how people learn, accumulating tricks to keep learners engaged over the long term and even know how well a student will score on a test before they take it. According to founder and CEO Luis von Ahn, AI’s ability to individualize learning will lead to most teaching being done by computers in the next few decades.

“Ultimately, I’m not sure that there’s anything computers can’t really teach you,” von Ahn said on the No Priors podcast recently.

He predicted education would radically change, because “it’s just a lot more scalable to teach with AI than with teachers.”

“By the way, that doesn’t mean the teachers are going to go away, you still need people to take care of the students,” he added. “I also don’t think schools are going to go away, because you still need childcare.”

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