In late April, language-learning app Duolingo made a sequence of AI-related announcements. CEO Luis von Ahn wrote a memo to workers detailing the corporate’s official “AI-first” strategy and the way, by “advances in generative AI,” it was capable of double its course choices in file time. Duolingo additionally stated it could “progressively cease utilizing contractors to do work that AI can deal with.”
Naturally, the information didn’t go over well with some Duolingo workers and contract staff. After a number of weeks of pushback, von Ahn has clarified his earlier feedback (whereas nonetheless committing to being “AI-first”) with a post on LinkedIn.
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“One of the crucial vital issues leaders can do is present readability,” von Ahn wrote. “After I launched my AI memo a number of weeks in the past, I did not do this nicely.”
Duolingo’s CEO famous that he has “taken time to comply with up internally with Duos (our workers),” after which wrote a abstract of these conversations for the general public.
“I do not know precisely what is going on to occur with AI, however I do know it should basically change the best way we work, and we’ve got to get forward of it,” he wrote.
He famous that Duolingo has all the time embraced new tech (“why we initially constructed for cellular as an alternative of desktop,” he stated), and that the corporate is “taking that very same strategy with AI.”
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“To be clear: I don’t see AI as changing what our workers do (we’re, in actual fact, persevering with to rent on the identical pace as earlier than),” von Ahn wrote.
He ended the submit stating that the corporate is offering AI coaching for workers on find out how to use the tech as a “software to speed up what we do, on the identical or higher stage of high quality.”
Whereas Duolingo’s CEO could also be making an attempt to calm workers’ fears of being changed by AI, Fiverr’s CEO is definitely not.
Fiverr CEO Micha Kaufman wrote in an inside e-mail final month (and since on X): “AI is coming for you.”
“It doesn’t matter in case you are a programmer, designer, product supervisor, knowledge scientist, lawyer, buyer assist rep, salesperson, or a finance particular person,” Kaufman wrote.
In a 2023 report, Goldman Sachs estimated that AI might automate 300 million full-time jobs. McKinsey, in the meantime, predicted that up to 375 million workers could also be displaced by AI by 2030.
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