{"id":75591,"date":"2025-08-17T18:07:08","date_gmt":"2025-08-17T18:07:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/75591\/"},"modified":"2025-08-17T18:07:08","modified_gmt":"2025-08-17T18:07:08","slug":"duolingo-ceo-says-controversial-ai-memo-was-misunderstood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/75591\/","title":{"rendered":"Duolingo CEO says controversial AI memo was misunderstood"},"content":{"rendered":"<p id=\"speakable-summary\" class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">While Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn was loudly criticized this year after <a href=\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2025\/04\/30\/duolingo-launches-148-courses-created-with-ai-after-sharing-plans-to-replace-contractors-with-ai\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">declaring that Duolingo would become an \u201cAI-first company,\u201d<\/a> he suggested in a new interview the real issue was that he \u201cdid not give enough context.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cInternally, this was not controversial,\u201d<a rel=\"nofollow noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/08\/17\/business\/duolingo-luis-von-ahn.html\" target=\"_blank\"> von Ahn told The New York Times<\/a>. \u201cExternally, as a publicly traded company some people assume that it\u2019s just for profit. Or that we\u2019re trying to lay off humans. And that was not the intent at all.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">On the contrary, von Ahn said the company has \u201cnever laid off any full-time employees\u201d and has no intention of doing so. And while he didn\u2019t deny that Duolingo had <a href=\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2025\/05\/04\/is-duolingo-the-face-of-an-ai-jobs-crisis\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">cut its contractor workforce<\/a>, he suggested that \u201cfrom the beginning \u2026 our contractor workforce has gone up and down depending on needs.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Despite the criticism (which <a href=\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2025\/08\/07\/the-backlash-against-duolingo-going-ai-first-didnt-even-matter\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">does not seem to have made a big impact<\/a> on Duolingo\u2019s bottom line), von Ahn still sounds extremely bullish about A.I.\u2019s potential, with Duolingo team members taking every Friday morning to experiment with the technology.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cIt\u2019s a bad acronym, f-r-A-I-days,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t know how to pronounce it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"While Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn was loudly criticized this year after declaring that Duolingo would become an&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":75592,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[64,63,44427,58270,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-75591","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-duolingo","11":"tag-luis-von-ahn","12":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75591"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75591\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/75592"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}