Duolingo Will Replace Contract Workers With AI 24
According to an email posted on Duolingo's LinkedIn, the language learning app will "gradually stop using contractors to do work that AI can handle." Co-founder and CEO Luis von Ahn also said the company will be "AI-first." The Verge reports: 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."
"AI isn't just a productivity boost," von Ahn says. "It helps us get closer to our mission. To teach well, we need to create a massive amount of content, and doing that manually doesn't scale. One of the best decisions we made recently was replacing a slow, manual content creation process with one powered by AI. Without AI, it would take us decades to scale our content to more learners. We owe it to our learners to get them this content ASAP."
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."
"AI isn't just a productivity boost," von Ahn says. "It helps us get closer to our mission. To teach well, we need to create a massive amount of content, and doing that manually doesn't scale. One of the best decisions we made recently was replacing a slow, manual content creation process with one powered by AI. Without AI, it would take us decades to scale our content to more learners. We owe it to our learners to get them this content ASAP."
I'm sure all those out of work contractors (Score:2)
Seriously try to list out the jobs people are going to do as automation takes over. It's always plumber isn't it?
Question for you plumber obsessed slashdoters, back in the day when I was broke I jerry-rigged my own plumbing or I lived without. When we no longer have a functional middle class who's going to be paying plumbers $300 an hour?
Quick let's hurry up and get another thought ter
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The people here are obsessed with plumbing because most of them are full of shit.
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How do you know all of this?
Re: Lies (Score:3)
t "Duolingo will remain a company that cares deeply about its employees" and that "this isn't about replacing Duos with AI."
They are in fact replacing 'Duos' with AI, and Duolingo in fact does not care about its employees.
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Why isn't a strong basic income on the table?
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Worthwhile social advances are historically paid for in blood.
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Question for you plumber obsessed slashdoters, back in the day when I was broke I jerry-rigged my own plumbing or I lived without.
It was already obvious that you grew up without indoor plumbing; there never was a need to spell it out. Back in your day, you had outhouses, wish books and the occasional corncob, and that's how you liked it. You only changed your ways after Sears and Montgomery Wards went out of business and your anus got so wrinkly that the corncob left you with too many injuries, forcing you to switch to the pennysaver.
Everything is fine and nothing you grew up with has to change in the slightest...
You're the only one who insists that nothing should ever change -- it's what you're asking for right n
Yep, y'all are getting fired (Score:2)
when a company goes ai-first, it means employees go last.
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Also means this is the time to sell your shares, before they're worthless.
Non-announcement (Score:3)
the language learning app will "gradually stop using contractors to do work that AI can handle
In other words:
- gradually - it's not happening YET, just *sometime*
- stop using contractors - well, since it's "gradual" it's more like a RIF and not really stopping anything
- work that AI can handle - well, duh! But since AI can't actually handle work that contractors currently handle, the contractors are safe...for now.
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The duolinguo app is based on quizzes of increasing difficulty. Chatbots are already very good at making such quizzes, they can produce an arbitrary large number of questions and for many languages. They still need *one* native contractor to review the QA, which is much less work than designing them.
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I'm well aware of what Duolingo does. I used the app for 7 years, until they switched to the strict "follow the path" design. At that point, I couldn't tolerate it because it forced you to go through endless repetitions of lessons you had already mastered, before you could, say, go on to a story or more advanced lesson.
That said, I don't know that AI could produce "an arbitrary large number of questions" in increasing difficulty. The problem would be picking questions that are significant in some way, disti
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>It's not all at once, it happens over a period of time
WOW okay, that changes everything
What are contractors? (Score:2)
What do they do and why can a chatbot replace them?
One more (Score:2)
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Amen
Curious (Score:3)
It's always very surprising to me, that when companies insist their workers can be replaced with AI - it never seems to be senior management roles they replace. Why can't the CEO be replaced by a chat bot? After all, CEOs don't do much but churn out bland boilerplate corporate text, they never deviate from the mean or do anything particularly surprising, they just copy what every other silicon valley CEO is doing that month - the human role seems completely redundant when you could so easily ask a LLM to do the job.
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The job of the CEO is to sell the product of any company, its stock, to rich investors or their highly representatives.
These tend to respond badly to an "AI" treatment and require a personal touch.
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highly *paid* representatives
(which makes these obnoxious cheap bastards just as insufferable as the rest of us from the billionaire class)
Professional translator here (Score:3)
I translate Latin, German, and Dutch to English professionally. I have enough experience to know that AI translations are educated guesses that are normally within an acceptable range of accuracy. But it hallucinates in translations to an astonishing degree. If you do not know the language you are translating from, it can fool you easily, especially with the confidence it seems to evince when answering your queries. This is the same in OpenAI, Gemini, and Grok.
I've never used Duolingo. I do not know if it is interactive or not.
If it is not interactive, I don't know why you would use it except to collect badges.
And if it is interactive, you'll be "learning" a language taught by a model that guesses based on statistics and that at times will justify its output with logical tall tales that in no way reflect the language as it is used by native speakers.