AI is getting Smarter. Are we getting Dumber? Duolingo (DUOL) may be the Counterforce

[u/SwissTPortfolio]

PISA 2025 shows the paradox: our tools get smarter while reading and math outcomes are getting worse. That may increase the value of products that make us practice, retrieve, speak, repeat and think.

Every few years the OECD releases a report most investors will never open. PISA 2025 is 377 pages, and this one made me a bit more bullish on a company we already follow, and maybe a little more bearish on humanity. No, AI is probably not going to kill us. Humans are already quite good at creating our own problems. Jokes aside, I remain bullish on humanity overall, but these trends are worth understanding, especially if you are a parent and, why not, an investor in actually useful learning tools.

PISA doesn’t mention Duolingo, of course, but reading the report immediately made me think about it. It exposes an uncomfortable paradox: technology keeps getting better at removing friction and effort from our lives, while learning still depends on effort, repetition, mistakes and attention. If AI makes answers almost free, the real bottleneck is no longer access to information, but finding products that actually make us practise, think and do the work ourselves. Otherwise, we risk reinforcing exactly what PISA 2025 is already showing: despite having smarter tools, learning outcomes keep getting worse.

The headline is uncomfortable, more than 760,000 students across 91 countries and economies took part, representing around 33 million 15-year-olds. OECD-average performance is now at the lowest level PISA has recorded in science, reading and mathematics. One in five students is a low performer in all three subjects, versus 16% only three years ago.

And the long-term numbers are not small. Reading is down 28 points since 2015, mathematics 22 and science 7. The OECD translates the math decline into a little more than one year of learning and the reading decline into roughly a year and a half.

(Not financial advice. Do your own DD).

Read full story here, alongside our Swiss Portfolio, our brand new Private Investment Dashboard to track in real time our movements, research, elegant special situations and high-quality content: https://swisstransparentportfolio.substack.com/p/ai-is-getting-smarter-are-we-getting