Duolingo has been a hotly contested stock for some time. For a while, investors saw AI as the winner of artificial intelligence. AI will enhance content output, optimize learning, and pioneer new languages. But if you look at it, Duolingo Here’s everything you need to know about how that perception has deteriorated over the past year or so as the company tries to keep up with the world of chatbot translation, where people can build their own personalized language learning tools.
And this week, the Bears won the battle. Even though the app with the owl mascot and crazy notifications beat all expectations in first-quarter revenue, and even raised its full-year profit outlook, the stock has slumped again, taking its loss over the past year to about 77%.
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JPMorgan analysts said in a May 2025 note that Duolingo’s AI-backed efforts to double its language library and enhance its educational content “will support user and paid membership growth.” The company’s CEO even defended its “AI first” strategy, despite a series of backlash over comments that AI is a better teacher than humans.
Duolingo ended up in a similar situation to many other software companies, despite its early adoption of AI tools and failures. OpenAI, humanandgooglereleased new AI tools and features. These allowed users to create a language learning tool that threatened to cut off a green bird’s wings based on a short prompt. While daily active users met last quarter’s expectations, monthly active users were weaker, coming in at closer to 138 million compared to Wall Street’s 143 million expectations, likely indicating continued slowing growth.
Even if CEO Louis von Ahn is able to realize his ambition to use AI to create an app that “can teach really, really well, much better than anything humanity has ever seen,” Duo’s slowing growth (the CEO previously blamed the slowdown on some of its “unchecked” marketing strategies) and other AI alternatives could make that achievement moot.
