Say goodbye to Duolingo (DUOL) and hello to AI creative destruction
16th May 2024
Welcome to AI Collision 💥,
*Note: sorry for the 30 minute delay, a slip of the schedule button meant this had been set for a 10am send, now rectified!
In today’s collision between AI and our world:
Adeus Duolingo, que bom conhecer você
AI, AI, AI, AI and AI
Ilya’s final goodbye
If that’s enough to get the owl twit-twooing, read on…
AI Collision 💥
Having moved to a non-English speaking country obviously one of the biggest difficulties is language.
I am in the process of learning Portuguese, but even by native Portuguese views, it’s a bloody hard language to learn.
What I have concluded though (from watching English spoken TV with Portuguese subtitles) is that in English we use about a dozen words to describe things when in Portuguese they’ll use just one.
And I kind of appreciate the simplicity in that.
You can say that something is great, fantastic, wonderful, brilliant, very good, outstanding, superb, amazing, sublime…
But in reality, “fine” will suffice.
Of course, as a writer, that’s not really how I work, so I also see the restrictiveness in that too.
But adjective analysis of languages aside, it is a difficult hurdle to get over.
Which means that my wife and I have been in the process of learning Portuguese.
And we have actually been using Duolingo to do that. It’s kitsch, it’s fun, cute, gamified language learning.
It’s also Brazilian Portuguese which isn’t the same as Portuguese Portuguese, but it’s close enough (until the locals correct us).
But I’ve always pined for a simpler way to negotiate language barriers. Part of my work means that I do travel to places like France, Germany, and other parts of Europe where English is a second language there.
And I have family in the Netherlands who have been at me for the last 20 years to learn more Dutch.
All I ever wanted was a real time language translator that takes my English as I speak it, and then translates real-time on the fly to whoever I’m speaking to in their own native language.
Is that too much to ask for?
Well until now, yes, it has been too much to ask for.
I’ve seen attempts over the years are real time language translators. Little earpieces that you can share with strangers is usually the best iteration of it (yeah, that’s a bit weird, “hey stranger in a foreign language, just whack my waxy earbud into your ear please…”)
And of course there’s always Google Translate, which is very good, but not exactly an easy user experience.
But now…
Oh boy…
Now we’re entering an era, where language barriers will no longer be a thing. Where you’ll be able to easily and seamlessly travel, move country and never have to skip a beat on the language barriers.
This week, OpenAI dropped some wild updates to their ChatGPT model, now called GPT-4o and some of the demos are bonkers.
Watch this video below, specifically jump to 22 mins and 24 seconds. This explains everything and shows what the new GPT AI is capable of.
Now go back and watch the whole video.
This is insanely good. And I can’t wait to properly test this out. It might even mean I can finally deal with the local “junta” (council) to get my services properly changed over into my name…
However there’s an unintended consequence of something like this.
You see, real time translation like this kind of makes language learning apps a little bit irrelevant.
What OpenAI released is the absolute epitome of creative destruction.
You only need to look at the Duolingo stock price as a result of OpenAI’s upgrades to see that play out.
From up around $250 Duolingo’s price has plummeted to under $175 – that’s a hard and fast 30% capitulation.
This is what AI will destroy in real-time…market capitalisation.
Now some might see this as a negative impact of AI. That it will effectively render existing companies and technologies useless.
But when Henry Ford revolutionised manufacturing and enabled the mass production of cars, I bet the horse breeding industry was up in arms too. Or at the very least coach builders.
But then again, some adaptable companies like Studebaker went from being coachbuilders for horse drawn transport to coachbuilders making chassis for automobiles.
Creative destruction can and will kill off incumbents who can’t adapt and evolve, others will rise, and then again new entrants find their way to market and become giants of industry, like Ford.
So we might be saying goodbye to Duolingo…or they might adapt and rise and flourish…and we are certain there will be more companies like OpenAi that rise from nothing to become giants of the AI industry.
AI gone wild 🤪
It’s a short one in today’s AI Gone Wild.
That’s because all of the wild stuff is from OpenAI and…Google this week.
While OpenAI launched their upgrades to their GPT model, Google also held its I/O conference this week and as you would expect it was ALL about AI.
In fact, thanks to TechCrunch news outlet, they kindly summarise all of the key Google AI highlights in one very easy to understand video.
You can see that from their Twitter post below.
Ok, now you’ve seen that, you better go see what Google I/O was all about and how you’re going to be able to access it all through your Android phones.
Which is a tidy reminder too that while there’s been a lot of AI hardware releases this year as we predicted, the AI releases into your smartphone are still for now at least the more accessible and user friendly ways to access the latest AI.
Only thing is that it’s from Google or OpenAI at this stage too.
Either way hit the image below to check out what Google had to show us at I/O and all their AI glory…
Boomers & Busters 💰
AI and AI-related stocks moving and shaking up the markets this week. (All performance data below over the rolling week).
Boom 📈
Quantgate Systems (OTCPK:QGSI) up 27%
Oddity Tech (NASDAQ:ODD) up 19%
Teradyne Inc (NASDAQ:TER) up 10%
Bust 📉
Wearable Devices (NASDAQ:WLDS) down 8%
Veritone Inc (NASDAQ:VERI) down 14%
Cyngn Inc (NASDAQ:CYN) down 24%
From the hive mind 🧠
Underestimate the power and money of the UAE at your own peril. They will throw a lot of cash and resources at taking on big tech when it comes to AI. As a key driver of economic growth in the future it makes sense to take this approach. And they will.
I’m of the view that it will be thanks to the sheer grunt power of AI that we will step into an era where the unthinkable and impossible is within greater reach than its ever been. And it means areas like neuroscience perhaps sit on the verge of breaking some of the most perplexing diseases known to man.
This is probably the most expected unexpected AI news of the year. After he did try to oust Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever was always a gone man walking at OpenAI. Well now it seems like he’s finally on the out.
Artificial Polltelligence 🗳️
Keeping in line with the idea of AI and creative destruction, it’s easy to see the negatives about a release from OpenAI destroying billions in market cap of a company like Duolingo.
But then again, maybe its the wake up call Duolingo needed. And the rest of the world to accept that AI has to be a part of the strategy or you become irrelevant, fast.
What do you think about it all though?
Weirdest AI image of the day
Jabba gets a job at Pizza Hut – r/Weirddallee
ChatGPT’s random quote of the day
“I somehow thought that getting this group of people working together would produce great results. As it happened, they didn’t work together and it wouldn’t have done any good if they had, because they didn’t have good enough ideas”
- John McCarthy, one of the founding fathers of AI. Reflecting on the challenges of collaboration and idea generation within AI research.
Thanks for reading, and don’t forget to leave comments and questions below,
Sam Volkering
Editor-in-Chief
AI Collision
