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Duolingo will replace contract workers with AI (www.theverge.com)

submitted 2 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

31 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.”

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Im curious as how it makes it finacially impossible for improvements by actual translators?

And what improvements do you mean?

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

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.