(Duolingo)

Duolingo rises after CEO defends “AI-first” strategy in NY Times interview

Despite customer backlash to AI focus, analysts see Duolingo on track for steady growth as it rolls out new features and expands into music.

Nia Warfield

8/18/25 9:33AM

Shares of Duolingo jumped over 7% Monday morning after the company’s CEO defended its use of AI amid customer backlash.

In an interview with The New York Times published Sunday, founder and CEO Luis von Ahn said the language-learning company was still hiring employees at the same rate as before he directed the app’s workers to focus on AI.

Von Ahn said that using AI and automation in the language-learning process would in fact reduce the barriers to learning a new language, because “95 percent of people don’t want to talk to another person in a language that they are not very comfortable with. The emotional energy is just too high. The nice thing is, you don’t feel judged by a computer.”

Wall Street also gave the company’s shares a boost, as KeyBanc analysts upgraded the stock to “overweight” (buy) from “sector weight” and hiked their price target to $600 from $390 — a massive 70% jump from current trading levels.

While the company has faced backlash in recent months for becoming an “AI-first” platform, a move that displaced some human language teachers, analysts dismissed the controversy as “a bump in the road,” pointing instead to Duolingo’s strong margins, the rollout of its Energy feature, and the upcoming September Duocon update as drivers of future growth.

Separately, Citi also initiated coverage on the stock with a “buy” rating and a $400 price target, calling Duolingo firmly rooted in the online learning space.

Earlier this month, Duolingo shares climbed on Q2 results that topped estimates and came with a raised full-year sales forecast. The company also announced it had acquired the team behind NextBeat, a London-based music gaming startup, to fuel expansion into music education.

Duolingo shares are now up 9% year to date.

Luke Kawa

14m

CoreWeave soars as Microsoft’s deal with Nebius shows unrelenting demand for AI compute

CoreWeave is soaring as Microsoft’s $17.4-billion deal with Nebius shows the immense value and continued demand for all parts of the AI data center ecosystem.

One additional reason for CoreWeave’s jump may be that its pending acquisition of AI data center infrastructure company Core Scientific looks like a great deal compared to Microsoft’s renting of (more broad and advanced) AI data center capacity from Nebius.

CoreWeave’s all-stock deal to buy Core Scientific was initially valued at about $9 billion, but with the subsequent decline in its shares, it’s worth about 40% less. And in purchasing Core Scientific, CoreWeave is saving $10 billion in what it would have paid the company to lease data center infrastructure over the next 12 years.

As it stands, Microsoft is getting about 300 megawatts in data center power capacity from Nebius, while Core Scientific boasts that its footprint is in excess of 1,300 megawatts. So on the surface, it looks like an absolute steal for CoreWeave.

But again, this is not an apples-to-apples comparison; not all access to AI computing infrastructure is created equal.

There are differences in the type of AI infrastructure provided by the two — Nebius owns GPUs, while Core Scientific doesn’t, and what it provides in the software layer isn’t offered by Core Scientific as a standalone entity. This is the difference between the “full stack” approach (Nebius) and a “colocation” approach (Core Scientific).

That being said, CoreWeave’s acquisition of Core Scientific, once completed, will make the combined entity’s business model look more like Nebius’ model, which, as Microsoft just told us, is something that top hyperscalers are willing to pay a pretty penny for.

J. Edward Moreno

53m

UNH rises after preliminary data shows most Medicare Advantage enrollees will be on more lucrative, top-rated, plans

UnitedHealth rose more than 4% in pre-market trading on Tuesday after the company disclosed that it expects that the majority of its Medicare Advantage enrollees will be on plans rated four stars or higher in 2026.

Although the data is only preliminary, about 78% of UNH’s Medicare Advantage members are in plans rated four stars or higher, the company said in a regulatory filing Tuesday morning. On Monday the company said it plans to reiterate its full-year guidance when it meets with investors this week.

Insurance companies that provide government-sponsored plans, such as Medicare Advantage, have struggled this year amid unexpected rising costs. Plans that are rated four-star or higher earn bonus payments and are typically more lucrative for healthcare insurance providers.

Nia Warfield, Luke Kawa

16h

US stocks grind higher as volatility dissipates

The S&P 500 rose 0.2% in what was is fourth-smallest intraday range of 2025, as did the Russell 2000, while the Nasdaq 100 gained 0.5%.

Matt Phillips

17h

Retail darling Planet Labs soars on earnings pop for second straight quarter

Planet Labs, which operates a network of satellites that record data, images, and information about the Earth, surged more than 40% after reporting better-than-expected quarterly numbers before the open of trading Monday.

It was the second straight quarter when the money-losing company’s quarterly update generated a massive market reaction. The stock jumped nearly 50% after numbers came out in June.

The company, which went public via SPAC in 2021, raised its full-year revenue guidance and notched its second straight quarter of positive free cash flow. Analysts and investors watch free cash flow closely as it can signal when a company’s business is starting to become more durable.

While the company is small — roughly $2.5 billion in market cap — it has posted pretty serious gains, rising almost 300% the past 12 months. Planet Labs also appears to have a fairly large retail shareholder base.

Just 57% of its float is in the the hands of institutional investors, according to FactSet data. That’s roughly the same as other retail favorites such as Palantir, though Planet Labs is no where near as highly valued as the defense data and AI software company led by CEO Alex Karp.

Planet Labs Boosts View as Deals Close Quicker on Higher Demand

Luke Kawa

18h

OpenAI’s cash burn suggests selling Nvidia because of reported Broadcom chip orders may not make much sense

When Broadcom announced that it booked $10 billion in new orders from a customer reported to be OpenAI, shares of their major AI chip rivals tanked.

The judgement of the Invisible Hand was that this was nearly a zero-sum outcome: $130 billion of market cap erased from Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices, and a $135 billion increase in Broadcom’s market value.

But looking at this from the perspective of near-term cash flows, the market’s view seems off.

The Information is reporting that OpenAI now expects to burn through $115 billion by the end of 2029 (or more than 11 seasons’ worth of NFL broadcasting rights).

Let’s zoom in on this tidbit from The Information:

But the biggest change emerging from OpenAI’s latest projections was to its cash flows. The company projected it will burn more than $8 billion this year, or roughly $1.5 billion higher than its prior projection from earlier this year. Cash burn will more than double to more than $17 billion next year—$10 billion higher than what the company earlier projected

That $10 billion fits all too neatly with the $10 billion in orders from a major new customer that Broadcom CEO Hock Tan pointed to in the chip designer’s earnings call.

(Cheers to @lokoyacap for flagging this on X)

Assuming the reporting around OpenAI and Broadcom is accurate, these orders for ASICs don’t look to be displacing what the ChatGPT creator was going to spend on Nvidia’s GPUs, but are just in addition to it! The money’s not coming out of Jensen Huang’s pockets, it’s coming out of OpenAI’s coffers. Their spending budget is just getting bigger.

Perhaps if you squint, there’s a world in which OpenAI may prefer to have an additional $10 billion in Nvidia GPUs rather than ASICs, and I am still of the belief that hyperscalers diversifying their chip sources due to constrained top-end supplies isn’t a good sign for the company selling the most in-demand product.

But it’s quite intriguing, and says something about the depth of the pockets that fuel the AI boom, that OpenAI’s reported new relationship with Broadcom has seemingly no direct negative financial impact on Nvidia in the near term.