Flying: Duolingo's active users keep soaring

2/10/24 7:00PM

Baby bird

‍If you’ve ever been annoyed at having to prove you’re not a robot on a website, and you’ve been irritated by a Duolingo notification to get back to your lessons, you can direct your frustrations toward Luis von Ahn, a Guatemalan entrepreneur behind both. Having sold his online authentication software idea reCAPTCHA to Google for “somewhere between $10m and $100m” in 2009, von Ahn teamed up with one of his PhD students, the aptly-named Severin Hacker, to take on the world of education. Deciding they wanted to make language learning affordable, the pair founded Duolingo in 2011, drumming up $3.3m in funding from investors such as Tim Ferriss and Ashton Kutcher.

The platform didn’t launch to the public until June 2012, but ever since the app has soared in popularity, becoming the center of the modern language-learning universe. By leaning into bite-sized lessons, users are hooked in their millions into starting what is otherwise a daunting prospect: learning to speak, write, and maybe even think, in another language.

Saying the right words

‍After its launch, Duolingo picked up traction quickly, nudging towards the top end of the highly-competitive education charts on app stores. By 2014, the company closed a $20 million Series C round, having picked up 25 million registered users. Fast forward a decade, and those milestones look almost petite, with registered users growing to over 500 million by the end of 2020, when we all had newfound time to pursue long-postponed goals for self-betterment.

But, even more impressive, perhaps, is the share of ‘Lingo heads who use the app regularly, with 83 million people actively choosing to reckon with reflexive verbs at least once a month, and more than 24 million doing the same every day, per the company’s latest figures. So, how did Duolingo win in a space that’s so competitive? They made learning fun… and addictive.

Chris Stokel-Walker

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Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5