Duolingo Will Replace Contract Workers With AI 46
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:5, Insightful)
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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Because there are no resources. UBI is a nice idea on paper, but only there. It's expensive, VERY expensive and governments don't have the money for that.
We do have the money for it, because we already spend it on welfare programs. Most people currently getting government assistance would end up getting approximately the same amount of money they get now. Most of everyone else would have their taxes go up by approximately the same amount that they get back from the UBI, so it would be a net zero change for them.
Re: I'm sure all those out of work contractors (Score:2)
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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
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What is your obsession with toilet paper and corncobs? The post you replied to didn't mention or have anything to do with them.
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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I read it formulated humorously in a news chronicle (I can provide a link but it isn't in English), that Duolingo granted its users, after few days of learning, the ability "to translate pizza by pizza in Italian". That said, more seriously, the arguments used to criticise Tinder apply here. As a subscription app, Duolingo does not want you solve your problem and leave, they want to keep you around for as long as they can. Duolingo therefore implements simple and fun lessons that give an impression of learn
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I would absolutely say my 7 year investment learning Spanish was worth it. I can now read signs, I can understand most of what is said around me by Spanish speakers, I can read (with some difficulty) news and stories written in Spanish, I still listen to Spanish podcasts.
However, I would qualify that by noting that I used Duolingo at a time when the company was more about learning and less about subscriptions. It allowed you to direct your own learning. You could pick the kinds of lessons that worked best f
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>It's not all at once, it happens over a period of time
WOW okay, that changes everything
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- 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.
Actually one of the few things LLMs do amazing well is translation, and development of pointless sentences. They are far better than translation systems of days gone by, and Duolingo already used some automated translation systems and automated content creation in the past.
If there is someone going to lose their job to AI - these contractors here will be among the first to go.
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You are right, LLMs are good at translation. But Duolingo isn't about translation, it's about learning a language. The difference is, when translating, you are given the full text up front, that needs to be translated. With learning, you are designing a curriculum to help people learn. It's a level of meta understanding of the process, that LLMs are absolutely NOT good at.
What are contractors? (Score:1)
What do they do and why can a chatbot replace them?
One more (Score:2)
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Amen
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Indeed. When "management" goes full "greed and stupidity", the organization is dead. It may just take a while to die.
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Simple: Most people are stupid and do not see reality, but something they made up instead. Most people are also easy to manipulate. Hence "ads", "marketing", "politics" and "religion". If people were, on average, reasonably smart, we would not have any serious problems on this dirtball ...
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Curious (Score:4, Insightful)
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)
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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.
I'm not sure what you think your point is here or why you're curious about it. AI doesn't think. Duolingo relies heavily on contractors for translation work as well as creation of quizzes and tests that are based on out of context single sentences commonly found in language. This is literally a large language model's core competence as no thinking, creativity, or strategy is required.
Or were you just going for a low-IQ "derp derp CEO = dumb, LOL" comment? If so why are you not running a $18billion company?
Professional translator here (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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AI != AI. Different models work differently. Some generic ones are quite bad, some specifically trained ones are excellent, but it may not be universal for all languages.
One thing about hallucinations though, AI hallucinations are random based on input context. Duolingo relies on teaching through repetition using slightly different structures over and over again. Like teaching someone that 1+2+3 = 6, then 3+2+1 = 6, then 6 = 2+3+1, etc.
Combine that change in question context with user reporting of nonsensic
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I translate Latin, German, and Dutch to English professionally
Wow, is there much demand for Latin?
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I'd guess right now is a peak period :)
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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.
Duolingo isn't a translator, it's meant to be a teacher but it's not a very good one. It's kind of useful for learning a bit of vocabulary but not really much else... and the vocabulary is terrible. It's no replacement for an experienced teacher or gaining experience for yourself.
Machine translators tend to suffer when it comes to dialects, slang and idioms. Not just in regards to non-English languages but it defaults to En-US, so it struggles to translate things from or to other forms of English. I rece
Hence the non renewal (Score:2)
I've been having fun with duolingo for a while now, but when news about this surfaced a few months ago, I just canceled my subscription. The app was already plagued with approximations, dubious content, audio errors, etc. but worked mostly. Moving some part of that to AI is likely to get things worse, especially if it is to remove human intervention in the process.
The subscription was yearly, so I assume there won't be a visible dip before a while, cementing them in the idea that they're moving in the good
Duolingo Will Replace Customers With AI (Score:2)
Might as well...
They already dead-ended the smaller languages (Score:3)
I was very impressed by Duolingo about seven years ago when they were rolling out a bunch of less served languages (Esperanto, Hawaiian, Swahili, and Klingon, etc) They were working with teams of volunteers (free labor) to build out those courses and only had to provide the core systems that they were already building for the big langs.
But a few years ago, they shut all of that down and removed access to the courses from the volunteers. They still keep the smaller courses around, but they are totally unmaintained and just run on automatic pilot.
It seems like they have chosen to go all in on the same five languages that everyone else does, but with badge chasing. Since those languages have the largest AI training set, I'm not surprised that they are going to boot their paid people after already booting the free volunteers.