Duolingo will “steadily cease utilizing contractors to do work that Al can deal with,” in line with an all-hands e-mail despatched by co-founder and CEO Luis von Ahn saying that the corporate can be “AI-first.” The e-mail was posted on Duolingo’s LinkedIn account.
In keeping with van Ahn, being “Al-first” means the corporate will “must rethink a lot of how we work” and that “making minor tweaks to methods designed for people received’t get us there.” As a part of the shift, the corporate will roll out “just a few constructive constraints,” together with the modifications to the way it works with contractors, searching for AI use in hiring and in efficiency opinions, and that “headcount will solely be given if a group can not automate extra of their work.”
van Ahn says that “Duolingo will stay an organization that cares deeply about its staff” and that “this isn’t about changing Duos with Al.” As a substitute, he says that the modifications are “about eradicating bottlenecks” in order that staff can “concentrate on artistic work and actual issues, not repetitive duties.”
“Al isn’t only a productiveness enhance,” von Ahn says. “It helps us get nearer to our mission. To show properly, we have to create a large quantity of content material, and doing that manually doesn’t scale. Among the finest choices we made just lately was changing a sluggish, guide content material creation course of with one powered by Al. With out AI, it could take us many years to scale our content material to extra learners. We owe it to our learners to get them this content material ASAP.”
van Ahn’s e-mail follows an analogous memo Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke despatched to staff and just lately shared on-line. In that memo, Lütke stated that earlier than groups requested for extra headcount or assets, they wanted to indicate “why they can’t get what they need finished utilizing AI.”