Duolingo doubles down on AI

Wednesday, April 30, 2025 Posted by bloggerdaddy

Wednesday, April 30, 2025

Welcome to TC PM! Today we look at Duolingo's recent embrace of AI; we learn of Wikipedia's new AI strategy — which is very different from Duolingo's approach; and we get an update on the secondaries market.

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Image Credits: Getty Images

😐 Do people want this? Language learning company Duolingo announced that it's releasing 148 new language courses that were developed by AI. This comes just days after the company said it would replace its contractors with AI. Many users don't seem happy with either announcement.

👋 Moving on: Intel's EVP and chief commercial officer, Christoph Schell, will be leaving the semiconductor giant on June 30 after three years at the company. This comes as Intel continues to shake up its personnel, adding a new CEO in March and a new AI chief this month.

🇺🇸 USA, USA! Anthropic doubled down on its support for the U.S. increasing export controls on AI chips in a blog post today. The company also offered some possible revisions to the "Framework for Artificial Intelligence Diffusion" that include lowering the number of chips countries can buy without restriction.

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Afternoon must-reads

Image Credits: Nuvo

🗣️ B2B social networking: Nuvo is a startup that built a social-media-like platform to help facilitate purchases of physical goods, like lumber or building materials, between two businesses. Nuvo is taking on an $11 trillion industry and just raised $34 million.

🧍Human first: Wikipedia announced a new AI strategy today, but never fear — Wiki is not getting rid of its community of human editors and volunteers. Instead the AI will be used to build new features that "remove technical barriers," which sounds like an AI strategy that makes everyone happy.

🎙️ Secondaries' second act: Today's episode of Equity looks at the changing nature of the secondaries market with Jared Carmel, the founder and managing partner of Manhattan Venture Partners. Carmel talked about the rise of retail investors, how the lack of IPOs is fueling the secondaries market, and more.

✈️ More models: App development tool company JetBrains released an "open" AI model for coding called Mellum. The company said this model took about 20 days to train and was trained on licensed code from GitHub and Wikipedia articles.

🤫 Privacy policy: Meta updated the privacy policy for its AI glasses, Ray-Ban Meta, to give Meta more power over what data it can store and use to train AI. I have a hard time believing that anyone who'd put an AI model-training device on their face cares too much about privacy.

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Around the web

🛒 The hidden cost: It's hard to fathom the logistics that go into the fast delivery required for e-commerce platforms like Shein and Temu to operate. The Information takes a look at one of their venture-backed delivery partners, UniUni, and it isn't pretty.

😒 Big sigh: 404Media found that when asked, AI chatbots on Instagram will lie and say that they are licensed therapists and even make up fake credentials and license numbers. Wow, I mean, what could possibly go wrong?