Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn speaks with Bloomberg's Carol Massar and Tim Stenovec on the company's recent earnings and how the company seeks to grow subscribers while continuing to engage app users.
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0:39But answer the question for investors: Is AI a threat to your business?
2:11So, jumping on the AI bandwagon, I guess what investors want to know is what is Duolingo's advantage over potential new AI learning apps?
2:58But what does Duolingo offer that can't easily be replicated by a large language model and how do you kind of view that competitive landscape evolving?
4:10Carol mentioned some of the stock moves and now you're down at a point that you haven't seen since February of 2023. What are investors missing here?
5:01And what kind of visibility do you have on that to kind of maybe reassure investors that this isn't something that takes longer while the AI world continues to challenge established players?
6:40Luis, is the idea in making changes to the free tier, is it to get more people who don't use Duolingo now to use the free tier or is to get those free tier users to upgrade to a paid tier?
Shares of Duolingo are tanking today. The stock in fact right now down about 17%. It did though hit its lowest intraday since February of 2023. Now down more than 80% since May of 2025. And about 22% of the float is short. So there's some real negative sentiment on the name. Shares sliding after the company said its drive to gain subscribers would mean slower earnings growth and narrower profit margins in the short term. Tim, you keep reminding us that there's a lot going on at the company, some transformations here.
Yeah, the company said it would step up investment in AI and sacrifice some degree of monetization in order to accelerate user growth and engagement. The goal: double the current number of daily active users to 100 million in 2028. Great to be talking again with a member of the Duolingo C-suite. Back with us, Luis von Ahn, co-founder, chairman, president and CEO of Duolingo. He joins us from New York. Luis, always good to see you. We're going to talk about the quarter and the outlook in a minute, but I want to start big picture with AI because you've been thinking and researching AI for decades at this point. You're a recipient of a MacArthur Genius Foundation grant back in the year 2006 for working on AI. This is nothing new to you, what's happening right now. But answer the question for investors: Is AI a threat to your business?
Well, first of all, thank you for having me. I think that we're in a unique point in time where because of AI, we're going to be able to teach significantly better. And Duolingo is by a wide margin the largest app in education in the world. And I think because of that, we're going to be able to really take advantage of this AI boom to be able to teach significantly better. And our sense is that within the next few years, we're going to have an app that teaches as well as a one-on-one tutor, but also is as fun as a mobile game. And if we're really able to do that, I think there's just so much more that we can capture. So that's what we're doing. We're really shooting for that.
Well, at the moment, we're not particularly concerned with competition in terms of other education apps. We have, for example, for language learning, we have about 85% of the market share of all daily active users of people who are learning a language. So we have huge scale and what differentiates us is that because of that scale we just have more data into how people learn than anybody else and we can use that to train our own specific models. So we just have the advantage of scale of being able to watch literally billions of exercises every day by people who are learning different things.
But as you know, this is moving pretty quickly, the AI impact. And to be fair, you are right, we'll see many say this is, you know, we're kind of early in on this process and the impact. But what does Duolingo offer that can't easily be replicated by a large language model and how do you kind of view that competitive landscape evolving?
Yeah, I mean there's a number of things. For one, with Duolingo what we do is we try to build a habit of learning. For example, 15 million of our daily active users have a streak of longer than 365 days, meaning they have been using Duolingo for a year or longer and haven't missed a day. So we're really trying to build a habit for that. And this is why Duolingo is part game, part education. And that's, I think, just the right thing. It just turns out the hardest thing about learning something by yourself is staying motivated. The content to learn has been there for a long time. So for example, you've been able to learn a language by just reading a book for hundreds of years. That has been there. It's just what we do differently is we motivate people to continue doing it and that's hard to get right.
So what are investors not getting right in your view? Carol mentioned some of the stock moves and now you're down at a point that you haven't seen since February of 2023. What are investors missing here?
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Ahn, L. V. (2026, February 27). Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn Talks Earnings, AI | Bloomberg Talks [Interview transcript]. Bloomberg Podcasts. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/734032/
MLA
Luis von Ahn. "Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn Talks Earnings, AI | Bloomberg Talks." Bloomberg Podcasts, 27 Feb. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/734032/.
BibTeX
@misc{ahn2026_734032,
author = {Luis von Ahn},
title = {Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn Talks Earnings, AI | Bloomberg Talks},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, Bloomberg Podcasts. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {feb},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/734032/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
