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.”
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…
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.
It can’t self-correct, write new curriculum, etc. It’s an abyss for errors and it does not understand when you correct it. I’ve tried and watched it give me the same alternating 2 answers that I told it were both wrong. If it’s wrong, you basically have no idea. You’re putting trust in a navigator that is simply reading instructions and understanding none of them.
I’ve been in tech professionally for around 18 years and have lived through trends and changes. This is by far the worst one and the most haphazard. I’m not anti-AI (I use Copilot at work and it’s constantly wrong), but what is happening now with this AI wave is just reckless. They’re throwing it at everything because shareholders love shiny new things that make line go up.
4 months 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 transcribed “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.
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
oh sure it’s great until it confidently hallucinates something completely insane and you have no way of realizing it’s gone off the rails
for this reason translations are probably the last thing generative AI should be used for, at least when it’s done in a language you speak you can double check it.
Duolingo still have translators. They just dont have as much. Now they only need to double check the output.
Its not an all or nothing situation.
Bro every post jn Lemmy about AI carries a bandwagon full of hateful morons who don’t even know why they’re so angry.
Trading off quality for money.