Duolingo will replace some employees with artificial intelligence. How does the CEO explain the company's decision?
Duolingo will gradually stop using contractors to do work that artificial intelligence can handle.
Duolingo will gradually stop using contractors to do work that artificial intelligence can handle.
This was announced by Duolingo co-founder and CEO Louis von Ahn in an email to employees, which the company shared on LinkedIn.
According to Duolingo's CEO, in 2012, the company focused on mobile devices, while competitors focused on mobile applications for websites. This became the impetus for the company's development. Now Duolingo is betting on AI.
“AI is already changing how work is done. It’s not a question of when it will happen. It’s happening now. When such a big shift is happening, the worst thing you can do is wait,” Louis von Ahn noted in the letter.
The company aims to become “the first in artificial intelligence.” Achieving its goal “requires a lot of rethinking,” and “making minor changes to the systems” will not be enough. Therefore, as part of this transition, the company will introduce “several constructive restrictions,” namely:
- stop using contractors to do work that AI can handle;
- will use AI in hiring and performance evaluation;
- The staff will be formed only if the team cannot automate most of its work.
“AI is not just about improving productivity. It helps us get closer to our mission. To teach well, we need to create a huge amount of content, and doing it manually is not possible. One of the best decisions we have made recently is to replace the slow manual process of content creation with a process powered by artificial intelligence. Without AI, it would take us decades to scale our content to more students. We have an obligation to provide this content to them as quickly as possible. AI also helps us create features like video calls that were previously impossible to create. For the first time in history, we can teach just as well as the best human teachers, and it is within our reach,” added Louis von Ahn.
The letter also states that “Duolingo will remain a company that deeply cares about its employees,” and that “this is not about replacing Duo with AI.”
Von Ahn's email follows a similar memo that Shopify CEO Toby Luetke sent to employees and recently posted online, saying that before asking for more staff, the team needed to explain why it couldn't achieve its goals with AI.
Recall that last year Duolingo laid off a significant part of its translator staff and replaced them with AI.
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