Generative artificial intelligence is the talk of the tech world, and Duolingo sees the technology as key to helping people learn a new language faster and more efficiently. Only it’s not Duolingo the company that has this vision.
It’s people like Rachel Williams, director of program management and content, who is encouraging her team to use generative AI to solve scaling challenges.
“We’re actively looking at how we build our courses, develop tooling and infrastructure, and design lessons for our learners,” Williams told Built In New York. “We’re evaluating bottlenecks and considering how we might change our approach to solving those problems with GPT.”
Companies are not innovative because of some intangible aspect hardwired into their “DNA.” They’re innovative because they have leaders who can see the promise of a new technology or practice and the specific value it brings to their company.
Continue reading to learn more about Williams and her work at Duolingo — along with two other New York tech leaders at Atmosphere and AlphaSights whose visions are driving their companies into the future.
To call Duolingo an early adopter of OpenAI’s GPT-4 would be an understatement. OpenAI’s new generative AI only recently hit the market and the language learning app has already built a new product around it — Duolingo Max. Rachel Williams, director of program management for content, is spearheading Duolingo’s efforts to integrate GPT-4 into content production.
Tell us a little bit about your career thus far. How have your experiences shaped you into the leader you are today?
Duolingo’s mission is to develop the best education in the world and make it universally available, and my job is to make this possible no matter where you’re starting in learning a language. I oversee a suite of teams focused on scaling, and this means increasing the number of courses we offer, the quality of content we develop for those courses and the volume of content. All of this ultimately increases the level of proficiency a learner can gain, all while decreasing the effort and time it takes for our teams to ship.
Previously, I worked at a literacy-focused edtech company in a similar role and as a product manager developing editors and publishing tools for editorial staff and platform users at Medium. Prior to working in tech, I played professional volleyball in Romania. One of the reasons I retired from volleyball was that pro teams didn’t have the same sense of identity or unity that we had at Stanford. I missed that deeply and it made the game less fun. So, when I reflect on my career off the court, one tenet, in particular, feels similar to my time as an athlete: I work to motivate my teams to aim high and find ways to make the path to get there a little smoother.
With any new idea or challenge we face, my colleagues and I are pushing our teams to consider how GPT-4 could help us.”
Tech moves fast. How do you stay ahead of the curve? What new technologies are you excited about or eyeing for future projects?
I’m lucky to work somewhere that’s nimble and creative, so we’re naturally on pace with wherever the industry is going. Duolingo was an app long before edtech really embraced that space, so it’s baked into our ethos as a company and it makes it easy to be on top of the latest technology. As for tech I’m excited about … generative AI! This answer probably comes as little surprise with OpenAI’s GPT-4 launch and our newest launch, Duolingo Max, which is built with that technology. We have been impressed with the amount of progress we’ve made in the last few months of R&D using GPT-4.
In the scaling area, we’re actively looking at how we build our courses, develop tooling and infrastructure, and design lessons for our learners. We’re evaluating bottlenecks and considering how we might change our approach to solving those problems with GPT. We’ve also found that where GPT-4 doesn’t produce publication-ready content, it can still be a source of creative inspiration if not a solid first draft. With any new idea or challenge we face, my colleagues and I are pushing our teams to consider how GPT-4 could help us. The technology is only going to get better and we want to grow with it.
What are the biggest tech projects your team is working on this year?
One of the projects I’m most excited about is our latest approach to developing advanced content, specifically for English learners. Nearly 90 percent of language learners around the world are learning English, but only 45 percent of Duolingo learners are taking an English course. We want to broaden our English learning course offerings to both improve the experience for existing learners and reach new learners. With generative AI and our unique teaching methods, we are working on a model for developing intermediate, and eventually advanced, content that we can easily scale to all of our English courses.
This strategy has required us to fundamentally change the way we approach course development. How do we serve learners who already know basic English when we don’t have a course that offers learning English in their native language? How can we make our existing English courses more comprehensive, delightful and effective? These are the questions we’re working on this year with one of our scaling teams. I am thrilled we are actively addressing this gap in our product.
Ryan Spicer didn’t learn about the importance of teamwork and motivating people from a leadership book. He learned on the pitch, sideline and in the classroom. Spicer is the chief revenue officer at streaming business TV provider Atmosphere, and he reflected on how his sports and teaching careers helped him develop the leadership skills that have been crucial in the nearly two decades he’s spent in the media industry.
Tell us a little bit about your career thus far. How have your experiences shaped you into the leader you are today?
My career started with minor league soccer and then I veered into coaching and high school teaching before entering the media industry at 26. Each stop on my journey has directly impacted my professional skill set and leadership capabilities. Playing professional soccer instilled a deep appreciation for the value of all contributions across a team. In coaching and teaching, I learned quickly that people receive information and find motivation in different ways. A great leader recognizes not only the individual talents of their team but understands how to motivate and inspire them.
My more than 18 years in media have been spread across a time of complete consumer transformation. Media today is watched, and subsequently produced and created, in a vastly different way than when my career began. As a result, I have learned that adapting and evolving are necessary both as a business and as a leader.
Along the way, I’ve been constantly reminded that a team’s performance relies on a shared goal and a clear vision of what success looks like as both an individual and a team. Great leaders are prescriptive in sharing that vision and creating a great foundation for their teams to be successful.
Leaning in and being curious will make you more confident and ultimately a smarter professional.”
Tech moves fast. How do you stay ahead of the curve? What new technologies are you excited about or eyeing for future projects?
Staying ahead of the curve is nearly impossible, but persistent curiosity and attention to the environment around you will help you do your best to keep up. A new consumer product or habit might not be part of your routine and that might cause some trepidation, but that shouldn’t stop you from asking questions. Fear and embarrassment can easily hold you back from being vulnerable about what you don’t know. But leaning in and being curious will make you more confident and ultimately a smarter professional.
Personally, I am excited to see new measurement companies embraced by the advertising community. The way audiences are measured and viewing habits tracked has been handled in a very archaic way for decades. New technologies will allow us to better understand how and when people watch across devices — whether eyes are truly on screens — and ultimately enhance marketers’ ability to make better advertising decisions.
What’s your vision for the future of your company’s technology? And how do you plan to get there?
Atmosphere uses connected television to bring better content to businesses where people are watching TV. At the moment, it is a relatively passive experience, with content and advertising shared with viewers. Soon, we will bring that experience alive and create more regular moments of interactivity for audiences to respond and engage with both the content and dynamic ads that run within our content. Viewers will be able to actively participate in the Atmosphere TV experience and interact with highly relevant advertising as well.
AlphaSights provides investors and business leaders with expert knowledge on-demand. Generative AI also provides knowledge on-demand, and rather than see this new tech as a threat, Global Head of Technology and Strategy Alexei Kalveks said the company’s innovation-focused mindset and experience with AI have it on the cusp of a “game-changing” launch.
Tell us a little bit about your career thus far. How have your experiences shaped you into the leader you are today?
I have always been fascinated by data and analytics. I studied mathematics at Oxford and spent my career pre-AlphaSights working with large financial data sets at funds and global investment banks. My passion for quantitative analytics has set me up well to apply myself to the core of AlphaSights’ technology stack, our “Knowledge Graph.”
The problem that our industry solves is connecting investors and business leaders with expert insights. At AlphaSights, our mission is to provide the most precisely matched expert knowledge faster and at a greater scale than the industry has traditionally been able to. We achieve this through our technology platform and proprietary relational database, the “AlphaGraph.”
The AlphaGraph maps the world’s expertise across companies, industries and topics. What makes our knowledge graph unique is the quality of its underlying data. Rather than relying on low-fidelity web scraping, the AlphaGraph is exclusively powered by millions of expert company and sector relationships curated by our global team of client service professionals each day.
I am particularly excited about our ability to deploy generative AI to instantly deliver synthesized expert insights.”
Tech moves fast. How do you stay ahead of the curve? What new technologies are you excited about or eyeing for future projects?
AlphaSights is at an exciting point in its technology journey. We have scaled to more than 150 engineers, data scientists, product managers and designers, and we benefit from the extensive and diverse experience of our global team. At the same time, innovation is hardwired into the AlphaSights mindset, and we are releasing disruptive technology faster than ever before.
Among many other innovation streams, I am particularly excited about our ability to deploy generative AI to instantly deliver synthesized expert insights. We have been experimenting with automated content summarization and aggregation algorithms for years. Now, we are at an inflection point where both the technology and the scale of our expert content library can combine to create something truly game-changing for our clients.
What are the biggest tech projects your team is working on this year?
As codified knowledge becomes ever more available via web aggregators and search algorithms, accessing the huge wealth of knowledge in peoples’ brains is critical to developing a competitive advantage. Our platform enables clients to access this expert knowledge frictionlessly. Three cultural tenets will ensure we achieve our vision.
First, we are client-led. Many companies say they are client-led but rarely speak to clients. At AlphaSights, the success of our clients is our North Star. Our product teams speak to multiple clients every day and process client feedback collected daily by our more than 1,000 service professionals.
Second, we empower our teams. We operate an aligned autonomy model where the engineering and product leads for each pod set their roadmap in the context of our vision and client value objectives. Our teams have high ownership and are motivated to go above and beyond to deliver exceptional technology solutions.
Third, we invest heavily in our tech stack. We invest significant resources into building a modern, agile tech stack. We are committed to delivering an excellent developer experience and building robust technology that will stand the test of time.
