Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn drew backlash when he said he wanted the company to be “AI-first.”
von Ahn said he “did not give enough context” when he laid out his plan in April.
He said the language learning platform does not plan to lay off any full-time staff because of AI.
Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn said his language learning platform does not intend to lay off any full-time employees because of AI.
“We’ve never laid off any full-time employees. We don’t plan to,” von Ahn told The New York Times in an interview published Sunday.
von Ahn said Duolingo relies on contractors for “temporary tasks,” and that their numbers go “up and down depending on needs.” He added that the work done by Duolingo’s engineers will likely change in the next five years because of AI.
“They may not be doing some rote tasks anymore. What will probably happen is that one person will be able to accomplish more, rather than having fewer people,” von Ahn told the Times.
Duolingo did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
In April, von Ahn drew backlash online after he published a staff memo about making Duolingo an “AI-first” company on LinkedIn. von Ahn wrote in his memo that the company could not afford to “wait until the technology is 100% perfect.” Duolingo has to “move with urgency and take occasional small hits on quality,” he added.
In his memo, von Ahn said Duolingo would pursue five “constructive constraints” to achieve this goal. The constraints included a gradual reduction in contractors to “do work that AI can handle” and increasing head count only “if a team cannot automate more of their work.” In 2024, Duolingo said it laid off 10% of its contractors, partly because of AI.
von Ahn told the Times that the backlash arose because he “did not give enough context” when he published the memo.
“This was on me,” von Ahn said.
“Internally, this was not controversial. Externally, as a publicly traded company, some people assume that it’s just for profit. Or that we’re trying to lay off humans,” he added. “That was not the intent at all.”
von Ahn said in his interview that Duolingo has been encouraging AI use through a weekly activity they call “f-r-A-I-days.” During the activity, Duolingo teams are allowed to “experiment on how to get more efficient to use AI,” he added.
The rise of AI has fuelled increased fears that more jobs will be destroyed, rather than created.
In May, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told Axios that AI could wipe out 50% of entry-level office jobs in the next five years. Amodei previously said in March that AI, and not software engineers, could be “writing essentially all of the code” in 12 months.
Paul Graham, the founder of startup incubator Y Combinator, said earlier this month that AI is “good at scutwork” and will not replace every job. He added said that while low-level programming jobs are “already disappearing,” top-notch programmers are still being paid high salaries.
“So I think the best general advice for protecting oneself from AI is to do something so well that you’re operating way above the level of scutwork,” Graham wrote in an X post on August 5.
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