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AI Education

Duolingo Will Replace Contract Workers With AI 70

Posted by BeauHD from the would-you-look-at-that dept.
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."

Duolingo Will Replace Contract Workers With AI More | Reply

Duolingo Will Replace Contract Workers With AI

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  • when a company goes ai-first, it means employees go last.

  • Non-announcement (Score:3)

    by Tony Isaac ( 1301187 ) on Monday April 28, 2025 @09:09PM (#65338645) Homepage

    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.

    • 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.

      • 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

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by alantus ( 882150 )
          Would you say the time investment in those 7 years was worth it? I've been using it for a few months, and so far it looks like the contribution this makes to learning a language is minimal. Plus, the app is full of ads, but paying for it doesn't seem to be worth it.

          • 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

          • 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

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by dvice ( 6309704 )

            I spent a year in Duolingo. I did not master the language, but I now understand the basic grammar. I think that Duolingo or similar is perfect for when you start learning a new language, because you get fast feedback and a lot of repetition. I think that we should use similar system at schools too. So I am happy that I used it. It really helped me to get started.

            I stopped using it, because it is so focused on sentences, which makes learning new words hard. I prefer repeating a list of few words quickly seve

        • >I used the app for 7 years, until they switched to the strict "follow the path" design.

          Bringing my Spanish back to speed was my covid project (instead, I ended up retiring really early!).

          I was spending an hour or more daily on Duolingo, and progressing rather rapidly (I made it through the first level of the entire tree in two weeks). I had been borderline fluent forty years earlier.

          Anyway, the single most useful thing was that each question was linked to its page in the forum. If you didn't understan

      • Users must prepare for a new era of ten thousand day natural streaks.

    • >It's not all at once, it happens over a period of time

      WOW okay, that changes everything

    • - 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.

      • 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.

        • It would be interesting to do a study of the grammar constructs that LLMs frequently use and see how it differs from human usage.

  • What do they do and why can a chatbot replace them?

  • One more platform to abandon.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Indeed. When "management" goes full "greed and stupidity", the organization is dead. It may just take a while to die.

      • Guys, we control these fucking systems. We control *everything*. Why are we allowing this to happen? Why are we complicit with this bullshit? For money? Who are these fucking evil devs?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by gweihir ( 88907 )

          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 ...

    • Hadn't you abandoned yet? Every change they made in the service made it worse. Going AI is just the final nail on the coffin.

    • One more platform to abandon.

      What will 'enshittification' be in Spanish?

  • Curious (Score:4, Insightful)

    by OzJimbob ( 129746 ) on Monday April 28, 2025 @10:26PM (#65338715) Homepage

    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.

    • 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.

      • highly *paid* representatives

        (which makes these obnoxious cheap bastards just as insufferable as the rest of us from the billionaire class)

    • 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)

    by Potor ( 658520 ) <farker1NO@SPAMgmail.com> on Tuesday April 29, 2025 @12:31AM (#65338823) Journal

    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.

    • 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

    • I translate Latin, German, and Dutch to English professionally

      Wow, is there much demand for Latin?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mjwx ( 966435 )

      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

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Potor ( 658520 )
        I realize that Duolingo is not a translation platform, but my claim is that I have front line experience with how AI "understands" language. If the removal of humans for AI is consequential enough, how long until learners of English start saying "vegetative electron microscopy [sciencebase.com]"?

  • 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

  • They already dead-ended the smaller languages (Score:4, Informative)

    by drillbug ( 126567 ) on Tuesday April 29, 2025 @08:18AM (#65339317)

    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.

  • So, about a week and a half ago I was at a social gathering at somebody's house and a married couple I don't know well at all was there. I was part of a conversation the wife was having. She was talking about using Duolingo to learn Spanish. I can speak Spanish at a high level, but I don't claim to be fluent. One of the guys in this conversation is a guy I know and he is fluent in Spanish. The lady said that Duolingo asked her to translate this from English into Spanish:
    "There's a problem with
    • "Costume" ("disfraz", in this context) is a fairly common word, but the sentence itself is quite impractical. That's one of the main problems with DL, the exercises are seldom connected with real world scenarios.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by hawk ( 1151 )

        > That's one of the main problems with DL, the exercises are
        >seldom connected with real world scenarios.

        Shirley, you jest!

        I can't be the only one who has to deal with drunken penguins on a regular basis! :_)

  • To teach you don't need massive amounts of content, lessons don't need to be superfacially unique at all, they're scalable on their own.

    The need to make new books for schools etc every year is based just on the need to sell them too, basics of languages do not change every year, a student doesn't benefit from unlimited amounts of basic class learning material.

  • Good for Duolingo. Of course, I long since replaced Duolingo with AI.

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