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

Link: https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/06/08/185209...

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".

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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