Fun and games: Duo's gamification and absurd TikToks are working

2/10/24 7:00PM

Word games

‍A huge part of Duolingo’s success is in good old-fashioned entertainment, or — as critics see it — the gamification of the language-learning process.

The company has made no secret of its use of fun to liven up its educational methods, incorporating numerous game mechanics and tactics into the app. As users learn, they are rewarded with experience (XP) points, they can win “gems”, and they need to keep hold of their “hearts” in order to keep playing… all features that could be straight out of a video game. And then of course there’s the streak — arguably Duolingo’s most effective psychological hook — which keeps people coming back to the app day after day, in order to keep their streak alive, with pushy notifications to tell you if you’ve forgotten to log in.

Those mechanics are core to what makes Duolingo so successful, but they’ve also positioned the company for criticism from those who say that they oversimplify the language-learning process, favoring lessons that optimize for in-app engagement over what might be most helpful in real world situations.

Weird is working

The company has also leaned into what has been described as “unhinged” marketing on TikTok. Unlike so many brands that post polished marketing material, Duolingo’s TikTok is meme-heavy… and often just straight up weird.

Videos have included the company's legal team trying to catch the owl mascot to stop it from posting online, obsessions with celebrities (notably Dua Lipa) and non-stop nonsensical memes. That approach has set Duolingo apart, growing to nearly 10 million followers, as people follow along to see the content that they presumably can’t quite believe is coming from an official brand channel. The company is also planning a 5-second local Super Bowl ad, which executives at the company say will be “quite stunting”.

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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.

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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