Duolingo will “gradually stop using contractors to do work that AI can handle,” according to an all-hands email sent by cofounder and CEO Luis von Ahn announcing that the company will be “AI-first.” The email was posted on Duolingo’s LinkedIn account.
According to von Ahn, being “AI-first” means the company will “need to rethink much of how we work” and that “making minor tweaks to systems designed for humans won’t get us there.” As part of the shift, the company will roll out “a few constructive constraints,” including the changes to how it works with contractors, looking for AI use in hiring and in performance reviews, and that “headcount will only be given if a team cannot automate more of their work.”
von Ahn says that “Duolingo will remain a company that cares deeply about its employees” and that “this isn’t about replacing Duos with AI.” Instead, he says that the changes are “about removing bottlenecks” so that employees can “focus on creative work and real problems, not repetitive tasks.”
The problem is not that Ai could replace humans; the problem is that executives think they can.
One of the first things drilled into me in journalism was “Smith thinks” should be recast to “Smith said he thinks.”
The C-suite is likely well aware of limitations, but shareholders like to hear about the hot new thing.
The thing is, the idea isn’t wrong. Automating complex tasks is a bitch, but the repetitive tasks that turn any job into a grind are prime candidates. The larger issue is instead of letting employees spend more time doing fulfilling activities because of increased efficiency, companies tend to do layoffs.
I nominate this comment as Quote of The Year.
That’s a U-Turn
>claims to care deeply about its employees
>replaces some employees with bots
Duolingo is talking out of both sides of their mouth.
Crazy, given the company name!
Leaning hard into enshittification, I see…
Okay, real talk guys. If there’s one thing LLM’s actually CAN do, its language and translation. The best ones are also great at context.
You sound a bit like people yelling at companies for laying off typewriter manufactures when the computer came along.
And we are in the technology community…
4 month ago I thought I’d cut some corners and instead of looking for an online Cyrillic keyboard to transliterate a simple three word phrase, I’d ask ChatGPT. it transliterated “zvezda” (звєзда, a star) as жірка (“zhirka”, a frying pan). that was the first and the last time I tried using LLM to do language stuff.
they cant actually but it’s convincing enough that you’ll think it’s the same, and in the process make it financially impossible for improvements to be made by actual translators.
Im curious as how it makes it finacially impossible for improvements by actual translators?
And what improvements do you mean?
if you put the people making translation possible out of work, you will run out of sources for useful translations.
LLM are not magic. They function off of human effort for thir training data. High quality data is thus, sourced from (in this case) human translators. Some can be done without them by nonprofessional texts, but it is not enough.
The problem is that while LLMs can translate, it’s still machine translation and isn’t always accurate. It’s also not going to just be for that. It’ll be applying “AI” to everything that looks like it might vaguely fit, and it’ll stifle productivity.
Not really, back then you replaced people with more people that knew how to operate “insert tech advancement of the time”. Sure there were still people losing their jobs, but not so much like we’re seeing with this AI bs
Duolingo will be losing this customer
That’s weird, because their servers can’t even seem to stay up long enough for any of the ai features in their app. It’s why I gave up on their max subscription because it would require doing conversations and 9 times out of 10 it would just stop listening/processing halfway through.
Darn I was about to start using it to learn French. Any suggestions?
Language Transfer . Much better for learning a language than Duolingo.
Come to france :)
My wife would not be happy if I did that
I’ve heard good things about Pimsleur
