Duolingo was one of the most beloved brands in tech.
But in 2025, a leaked memo exposed the company’s true AI strategy: automate education. The backlash was instant. Reddit turned. TikToks went viral. Loyal users walked away from thousand-day streaks.
This is the inside story of Duolingo's unraveling: how a brand built on personality and playfulness lost user trust overnight, alienated its community, and put years of brand equity at risk all while selling a different story to investors.
Chapters
(0:00) Why Duolingo users started quitting
(0:42) AI as a teaching tool or a threat to quality?
(1:12) When Duolingo went all-in on AI
(2:07) The memo that kickstarted Duolingo’s downfall
(2:57) From viral love to viral hate
(3:17) Duolingo’s off-brand response
(3:52) The scramble to win users back
(4:12) What every founder (and brand) can learn
Transcript
In May, 2025, Duolingo users started quitting. I quit Duolingo. We are watching the live downfall of Duolingo.
Tiktoks went viral. The Reddit community turned on them all because of a memo posted by the CEO AI is really positive for our business.
In this video, I'll break down what happens when a consumer brand tells one story to users and another to investor.
How that tension backfired for Duolingo and what not to do during a PR crisis. Guys, Duolingo’s downfall is here.
You already know this, but Duolingo was one of the most loved brands in tech since 2012. They've worked to create a cult following the green owl, the memes, the passive aggressive streak reminders.
It felt chaotic. Funny, personal, but internally, the company was moving in a different direction. By 2020. Duolingo was integrating AI first with Bird Brain, then GPT-3, but they kept it quiet in public.
They still leaned on the owl, their human experts, and a tone that made the app feel alive. This was a contradiction on the outside playfulness, community, personality on the inside, automation scale, efficiency.
It raised a tricky question for Duolingo. How do they scale using AI without breaking the brand? While selling a story investors wanted to hear by 2023, the shift was harder to Miss.
Duolingo launched Max Duolingo Max powered by GPT-4. It offered AI role play instant explanations and personalized feedback inside the company.
Some called it Duolingo ChatGPT moment. The stock tripled within a year and the messaging change. Its tagline became AI and Education make a great duo. Duolingo worked with OpenAI for years. The same year, the New Yorker profiled, CEO Luis von Ahn. He said replacing teachers is a worthwhile trade off.
Then came the rollout in April, 2025. Duolingo released 148 new courses built with generative AI. von Ahn said our first a hundred courses took about 12 years. The next 150 took just one. The internal roadmap shifted towards full stack automation from lesson content to gamified features with AI led characters, but users started to suspect a drop in quality.
Recently, things have gotten so bad. Then came the memo. In May, 2025, von Ahn on wrote a post that made the company's direction clear, automate everything. It was the first time Duolingo had said it out loud. One line stood out, humans won't get us there. The memo detailed what AI first meant In practice, headcount would only grow if AI couldn't do the job.
New hires and existing teams would be evaluated on how well they used AI. More jobs would be cut, support would be handled by chatbots. None of this was a pivot. It was a strategy, months in motion. It was just never shared. Publicly, the goal was to scale personalized education, but to many users, it felt like the soul had been stripped out.
Alan, are you spending on infrastructure, content? Where's the money going? I'm demanding Answers from the CEO. Duolingo set out to optimize the backend, but what they were really changing was the front end, their brand, and it didn't go unnoticed. The response was instant. Reddit threads called the new content AI slop full of mistakes on TikTok.
Users said the app felt like a robot pretending to care. Videos tagged Duolingo AI racked up over 10 million views in days, most of them negative. Even LinkedIn piled on. Some users walked away from streets they'd kept for over a thousand days. After users turned, Duolingo pulled back. The company known for chaos and humor went quiet.
First, they deleted comments. Next, they temporarily wiped their TikTok and Instagram feeds yours of brand voice gone. Then von Ahn went on a podcast and added fuel to the fire. He said, I'm not sure that there's anything that computers can't really teach you. I think speculating schools would mostly exist for childcare.
While AI handled the teaching to users, it sounded like the company had stopped listening. So Duolingo resumed posting only this time with carefully worded lines. Community feedback is valued and humans are still in the loop. Then at the end of May von Ahn walks some of it back. Our employees are what make Duolingo so amazing.
So we're gonna continue having employees, and not only that, we're actually gonna be hiring more employees, but he also didn't reverse course. I see AI as a tool to accelerate what we do at the same or better level of quality. If anything, his comments suggested he still believed the trade-offs were worth it.
This is a case study in nailing the right messaging to the right audience. I know you're upset. I know people are upset. I wanna make this right. That matters even more when different audiences care about different things. In duo's case, that was public market investors versus everyday people trying to learn a new language.
For your company, it might be investors versus users or employees versus customers. The same principles apply. Know exactly who you're talking to and what matters most to them.
Hiten
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