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After 'AI-First' Promise, Duolingo CEO Admits 'I Did Not Expect the Blowback' (ft.com) 30

Last month, Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn "shared on LinkedIn an email he had sent to all staff announcing Duolingo was going 'AI-first'," remembers the Financial Times.

"I did not expect the amount of blowback," he admits.... He attributes this anger to a general "anxiety" about technology replacing jobs. "I should have been more clear to the external world," he reflects on a video call from his office in Pittsburgh. "Every tech company is doing similar things [but] we were open about it...."

Since the furore, von Ahn has reassured customers that AI is not going to replace the company's workforce. There will be a "very small number of hourly contractors who are doing repetitive tasks that we no longer need", he says. "Many of these people are probably going to be offered contractor jobs for other stuff." Duolingo is still recruiting if it is satisfied the role cannot be automated. Graduates who make up half the people it hires every year "come with a different mindset" because they are using AI at university.

The thrust of the AI-first strategy, the 46-year-old says, is overhauling work processes... He wants staff to explore whether their tasks "can be entirely done by AI or with the help of AI. It's just a mind shift that people first try AI. It may be that AI doesn't actually solve the problem you're trying to solve.....that's fine." The aim is to automate repetitive tasks to free up time for more creative or strategic work.

Examples where it is making a difference include technology and illustration. Engineers will spend less time writing code. "Some of it they'll need to but we want it to be mediated by AI," von Ahn says... Similarly, designers will have more of a supervisory role, with AI helping to create artwork that fits Duolingo's "very specific style". "You no longer do the details and are more of a creative director. For the vast majority of jobs, this is what's going to happen...." [S]ocietal implications for AI, such as the ethics of stealing creators' copyright, are "a real concern". "A lot of times you don't even know how [the large language model] was trained. We should be careful." When it comes to artwork, he says Duolingo is "ensuring that the entirety of the model is trained just with our own illustrations".

After 'AI-First' Promise, Duolingo CEO Admits 'I Did Not Expect the Blowback'

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  • by UnknowingFool ( 672806 ) on Sunday June 08, 2025 @02:25PM (#65436127)
    AI is a trend that companies somehow think will sway the public when it does not. It is like blockchain and NFTs. While these technologies may have uses, companies should really think about what are the benefits and disadvantages of using these technologies. To publicly touted that you are going "AI first" is not garnering the support that companies think will garner. Now, investors love the idea of technologies reducing cost with zero disadvantages; however, investors are known to reward short-term gains over long-term benefits.
    • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Sunday June 08, 2025 @02:39PM (#65436155)
      I don't think it matters what the public likes or dislikes. There is so much market consolidation anymore that the public just has to suck it down. We would need drastic changes to our government and our voting to make any difference in that.

      Most likely the technology didn't work and he's back peddling because of it.

      What he was probably trying to do was a pump and dump with investors. Right now there is a bunch of Rich assholes buying up companies firing everyone and saying they're all replaced with AI and then getting a fuck ton of money coming in from investors.

      Don't get me wrong this is the problem with America we have absolutely no concept of nuance. Either every job gets replaced with AI or no job gets replaced with ai.

      So when everything is washed out we are probably going to have around 20 to 30% of the jobs permanently gone and we are probably going to have people forced to work 80 hours a week to make up the difference and a huge amount of permanent technological and social unemployment

      But it's not going to happen all at once to everyone and everything so people can't comprehend it. Everything has to be like a light switch. Either on or off but no gradation for them to understand it and the impact.

      It's more like boiling a frog. Only the frog is smart enough to jump out.
      • by jp10558 ( 748604 )

        Most likely the technology didn't work and he's back peddling because of it.

        This is probably it. AI has niche uses, but at least as it's sold to the public it's not at all what the marketing says. And what it's good at probably isn't going to get a lot of subscriptions.

        It's good at some limited green field coding. You still hit a hard wall with actual environment context. MCPs claim to help solve this, but those hit a hard wall with IT Security, data sovereignty, and more. I think MS has the lead here as th

        • There is pretty good evidence that llms are drastically increasing productivity. Hell if you contact chatbot customer support and they can't figure out your solution they don't give you to a person anymore they give you to a more advanced chatbot.

          Again you have to start thinking in nuanced terms or you're going to get blindsided.

          Llms are likely to increase productivity substantially, realistic estimate so far are around 20 to 30%.

          You should be expecting layoffs equal to that. Probably a bit big
          • There's a lot of hype and outright fraud out there when it comes to the supposed capabilities of LLMs and what they bring to the table. See also The Leaderboard Illusion paper [arxiv.org]. It's important to not be overwhelmed by all the claims.

            There's an old business trick from the 80s that explains much without needing to invoke real productivity increases from LLMs. It involves new investors, direction change, layoffs, and repackaging the valuable business assets, then selling them off and letting the old carcass e

          • Your AI started hallucinating again. It went on doe tangent about half of the voters worrying about trans people or something totally unrelated to the topic of this Slash. Period dot.
    • Well, the public likes to *use* AI for themselves. They just don't like it when business use it, or claim to use it, to eliminate jobs.

  • I had been considering checking out Duolingo as a way to do something useful in my downtime. After hearing about the AI and other changes, it seems to have nothing to offer that a free online resource doesn't. Not even an owl, anymore. I liked the owl.

    But yeah, if I worked there I would be not just disappointed, but enraged.

  • Duolingo shouldn't have said anything about adopting AI. Like any new technology, it should be adopted in a slow rollout, A/B tested, fine tuned, etc. After it produces results, don't give credit to AI, give the credit to Duolingo. When the public hears that Duolingo is adopting AI, they immediately think that it will be hallucinating translations and that the quality will suffer. Some might even avoid Duolingo simply to 'fight back' against AI.
  • DUOLINGO is annoying (Score:4, Interesting)

    by gavron ( 1300111 ) on Sunday June 08, 2025 @03:38PM (#65436247)

    Everyone has a method of learning but over time we've learned classrooms with one on one teacher interaction works.
    Duolingo has not learned this.

    I am trilingual and tried Duolingo for 180 days. I tried free, paid, etc. It did help me learn vocabulary words NOBODY KNOWS.
    Like for example, "camarero" for waiter. Sorry, the word is "mesero." Or "Boligrapho" for pen. Sorry, the word is "Plume."

    There's pronounciation. Duolingo has people saying the word Yo as "Joe". No, nobody says "Joe quiero taco bell." We say "Yo."
    Also there's "Elle" which Duolingo pronounced "Ejje".

    That's core language stuff. Then there's the site. Many times (Android, Linux, Crome, Firefox) it wouldn't let me click on a word.
    Sometimes when I had to speak it wouldn't "recognize" one word and while I repeat it perfectly (with a fluent Spanish speaker at
    my side) it refused to accept it.

    I don't care if they use AI (LLMs) or humans or trained monkeys. It's a piece of crap.

    All that is about the language learning part. Bad vocabulary, bad pronunciation, failure to recognize, and bad website.
    But the damn thing emailed me daily "reminding" me to keep my "streak" going and "my friends'" streaks. I tried to turn
    it off but to no avail.

    Duolingo is a piece of crap. I credit them with teaching me vocabulary words nobody else knows, filling my mailbox with
    exhortations, and generally being annoying.

    Can't wait for their inevitable exit from the market.

    I speak three languages. I wanted to be able to converse in Spanish. Half a year later I hate them so very very much.

    • Duolingo has people saying the word Yo as "Joe". No, nobody says "Joe quiero taco bell."

      There are many dialects of Spanish. Mexicans don't pronounce it that way, but Cubans do (think Al Pacino's Scarface), and also a Venezuelan that I worked with.

      • Duolingo has people saying the word Yo as "Joe". No, nobody says "Joe quiero taco bell."

        There are many dialects of Spanish. Mexicans don't pronounce it that way, but Cubans do (think Al Pacino's Scarface), and also a Venezuelan that I worked with.

        Came here to say that. Yes, some Spanish speakers do pronounce their Spanish words that way. There are indeed many dialects.

        • I studied Spanish in US grades 6-12. Even by grade 8, teachers who had experience in Peace Corps or other foreign service, noted at least the existence of variations of pronunciations and cadence. Yo/Joe was specifically called out, as was a tendency for rapid cadence in Cuban speech. Exposure to Los Angeles street Spanish brought some additional knowledge of diverse profanities. Lesson of greatest enduring value: teachers who had been in Spain during the Franco era, had a tendency to look around and lower
        • Argentinian pronounce the Y and LL as a J. Me jamo Fortnite_Beast for example. Instead of me yamo Cowboy Neal.
    • No, nobody says "Joe quiero taco bell."

      Inexplicably, some people actually do...

    • I am trilingual and tried Duolingo for 180 days. I tried free, paid, etc. It did help me learn vocabulary words NOBODY KNOWS.
      Like for example, "camarero" for waiter. Sorry, the word is "mesero." Or "Boligrapho" for pen. Sorry, the word is "Plume."

      There's pronounciation. Duolingo has people saying the word Yo as "Joe". No, nobody says "Joe quiero taco bell." We say "Yo."
      Also there's "Elle" which Duolingo pronounced "Ejje".

      Aren't those regional differences?

    • Further proving your point that Duolingo is a piece of crap. They mix dialects and teaches a chimera nobody speaks. Words and pronunciation from different dialects all mixed up. Not a single human could be as bad. Any human would teach one dialect, consistently.

      "Camarero" is the word in Spain. If you look for a job of "mesero" in Spain, the offers you get say "camarero" https://www.randstad.es/candid... [randstad.es]

    • I am trilingual and tried Duolingo for 180 days. I tried free, paid, etc. It did help me learn vocabulary words NOBODY KNOWS.
      Like for example, "camarero" for waiter. Sorry, the word is "mesero." Or "Boligrapho" for pen. Sorry, the word is "Plume."

      There's pronounciation. Duolingo has people saying the word Yo as "Joe". No, nobody says "Joe quiero taco bell." We say "Yo."
      Also there's "Elle" which Duolingo pronounced "Ejje".

      That's core language stuff. Then there's the site.

      It sounds like you're splitting hairs over dialects and accents. Also it's not "plume" it's "pluma", and in Mexico (northern parts at least, which are what most commonly spill into the US) there's basically only pluma, in Spain and other hispanic regions there's typically both. Notice pluma is also the word for feather, as in like a feather pen, this is different from a boligrafo (yeah, you misspelled it) as in like a ball-point pen.

      Notice also that it highly varies by region how words with the "y" sound ac

  • He seems to be having a little memory issues about which things he said that were causing the uproar.

    Reminder: It was the Duolingo CEO says there may still be schools in our AI future, but mostly just for childcare [businessinsider.com].

  • I've been through this since 1984. I recognize the walk and the talk.

    If he could, he would replace every worker except himself with AI.

  • The issues with Duolingoare getting long in the tooth, we all know pronunciations are bad but acceptable, it's frustrating to userbase if you're gamifying language learning but then can't probably judge participants correctly and give them poor scores because they're able to properly pronounce.

    Another longstanding issue is taking away the user supported forum because they didn't want pay people to manage it.

    Guess what, you can offer free DuoLingo memberships to people that help moderate forums. You ca
  • by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Monday June 09, 2025 @02:09AM (#65436873) Homepage Journal

    They have their heads so far up their own ass that they aren't aware of us peons constantly complaining about this AI bullshit and how we don't want software that hallucinates and lies to us replacing our jobs.

According to the latest official figures, 43% of all statistics are totally worthless.

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