'It always seemed unfair to me that the people who most needed to learn a language for access to better jobs and schools were also the ones who could least afford it,' said von Ahn. TechRepublic: Black Friday 2018: Best deals for professionals | Adobe Creative Cloud gets 25% discount for Black Friday | A guide to tech and non-tech holiday gifts to buy online The company's endgame is to become a publicly traded company, with a possible IPO in the next three years. Hiring has ramped up across the company, and the AI team this year expanded to nine people. This year subscriptions took over as Duolingo's top revenue source, and the company is planning to roll out new AI-powered features to make the subscription option more compelling.ĭuolingo said it's on track to do $40 million in revenue this year, roughly breaking even. Looking at its business model and long term plans, Duolingo said the bulk of its revenue comes from advertising, and subscriptions from people who pay to remove the ads. 'But for machine learning, the actual models and AI architecture, we are inventing them.'Īlso: Star Trek's Klingon language comes to Duolingo CNET 'In terms of the computing resources, we deploy on AWS for cloud infrastructure,' he added. 'The problems we encounter are not standard and are specific to the data we have, so we don't always have a lot to lean on.' 'The deep learning models we use are, for the most part, things we had to invent ourselves,' said Settles. On the content development side, Duolingo is using AI to develop course curriculum, and deep learning to extrapolate English coursework into other languages and to improve understanding of semantics and word frequency. The key areas of focus include content development, personalization and cognitive modeling. Settles said Duolingo is now expanding the use of AI in its core language learning app. Over 300 US universities now accept the Duolingo language proficiency test, including Yale, New York University, UCLA and Duke. And it can be done anywhere in the world with internet access.'

That way we can administer the test, from start to finish, in 45 minutes. 'We use AI to verify the person's identity, generate the test items, score them and administer the test adaptively. 'The last four years or so, 90 percent of our AI development has been in that proficiency test,' he added. Naturally, Duolingo saw an opportunity for disruption.Īlso: Inside the black box: Understanding AI decision-making The entire TOEFL industry, with an estimated worth of around $5 billion, is occupied by just a handful of companies.

Duolingo headquarters