Luis von Ahn, co-founder and CEO of popular language learning app Duolingo, announced on LinkedIn that the company will be making a hard pivot toward AI. But what does that mean? Well, to von Ahn, that means phasing out human contractors by using AI to replace human labor. Fear not, though, because he has your best interests at heart!
“‘AI isn’t just a productivity boost,’ von Ahn says. ‘It helps us get closer to our mission. To teach well, we need to create a massive amount of content, and doing that manually doesn’t scale. One of the best decisions we made recently was replacing a slow, manual content creation process with one powered by AI. Without AI, it would take us decades to scale our content to more learners. We owe it to our learners to get them this content ASAP.'”
von Ahn feels confident in his decision to become an “AI-first” company, comparing it all to the early 2010s: “In 2012, we bet on mobile. While others were focused on mobile companion apps for websites, we decided to build mobile-first … For the first time ever, teaching as well as the best human tutors is within our reach.”
Check out the full transcript in a BlueSky post under the cut:
— Culture Crave 🍿 (@culturecrave.co) Apr 28, 2025 at 11:14 PM
ONTD, y’all remember when Duolingo commented on the Depp/Heard trial?
Sources: 1, 2
