Duolingo will “step by step cease utilizing contractors to do work that AI can deal with,” in response to 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 von Ahn, being “AI-first” means the corporate will “have to rethink a lot of how we work” and that “making minor tweaks to programs designed for people received’t get us there.” As a part of the shift, the corporate will roll out “a number of constructive constraints,” together with the modifications to the way it works with contractors, in search of AI use in hiring and in efficiency evaluations, and that “headcount will solely be given if a group can not automate extra of their work.”
von Ahn says that “Duolingo will stay an organization that cares deeply about its workers” and that “this isn’t about changing Duos with AI.” As a substitute, he says that the modifications are “about eradicating bottlenecks” in order that workers can “deal with artistic work and actual issues, not repetitive duties.”
“AI isn’t only a productiveness increase,” 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. Top-of-the-line choices we made lately was changing a sluggish, handbook content material creation course of with one powered by AI. With out AI, it might take us a long time to scale our content material to extra learners. We owe it to our learners to get them this content material ASAP.”
von Ahn’s e mail follows an identical memo Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke despatched to workers and lately shared on-line. In that memo, Lütke stated that earlier than groups requested for extra headcount or sources, they wanted to indicate “why they can not get what they need carried out utilizing AI.”
Right here’s the textual content of von Ahn’s memo from Duolingo’s LinkedIn publish:
