Duolingo is laying off staff, artificial intelligence will do the work

Duolingo will gradually stop using freelancers for tasks that artificial intelligence can handle, according to an internal email sent to employees by co-founder and CEO Louis von Ahn.

As he stated, the company will "have to rethink a lot of the way it operates" because "small adjustments to systems designed for people are not enough," reports the Telegraph.

As part of this change, the company will introduce “some constructive restrictions,” including changes to how it works with freelancers, requiring artificial intelligence solutions in hiring and performance reviews, and a rule that “new employees can only be hired if the team cannot automate a significant portion of their work.”

Von Ahn says that "Duolingo remains a company that values ​​its employees" and that "it's not about replacing people with artificial intelligence."

"AI is not just a tool to increase productivity. It brings us closer to our mission. To teach quality, we need to create a huge amount of content, and creating that content manually simply isn't scalable," the Duolingo co-founder said in a message posted on LinkedIn.

"One of the best decisions we've made recently was to move from a slow, manual process of content creation to one powered by AI. Without AI, it would take decades to create enough content for everyone. We owe it to them to speed up this process," he added.

This email follows a similar internal memo sent to employees by Shopify CEO Toby Litke, in which he stated that teams must first demonstrate "why they can't accomplish tasks using AI" before asking for more resources or people. /Telegraph/