AI Over Humans? Duolingo to Replace Contract Staff With AI

Language-learning platform Duolingo plans to prioritise artificial intelligence over humans. In an email sent to the company’s employees, Duolingo’s co-founder and chief executive officer, Luis von Ahn, said he will stop hiring contractual workers for work that AI can do — a move he said would help the company position itself as “AI-first.”

“Being AI-first means we will need to rethink much of how we work. Making minor tweaks to systems designed for humans won’t get us there,” Ahn said in the email. While he said the company needs “to start from scratch” in several cases, Duolingo cannot “rebuild everything overnight.” As much as the company, he said, wants to do that, it is short on time. “However, we can’t wait until the technology is 100% perfect. We’d rather move with urgency and take occasional small hits on quality than move slowly and miss the moment,” he said.

One of the “hits” he mentions involves slowing down the hiring of contractors and eventually stopping it. This means Duolingo will “gradually” stop hiring employees on a project basis — though it did not say what roles will be impacted. von Ahn says, “Duolingo will remain a company that cares deeply about its employees” and that this adjustment “isn’t about replacing Duos with AI.” According to him, it is about removing “bottlenecks” from the system so that employees can focus on “creative work and real problems, not repetitive tasks.”

von Ahn’s letter to his employees comes days after Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke asked his teams to reconsider hiring more humans. He said teams must show “why they cannot get what they want done using AI” before they ask for more headcount or resources.

Can AI replace humans?

The increasing number of cases of companies replacing human staff with AI-powered counterparts has intensified the ‘AI vs Humans’ debate. While experts believe AI cannot fully replace humans in several fields like medicine and food, companies have unhesitantly automated operations of different departments, resulting in the loss of human jobs. The app industry, to which Duolingo belongs, is more prone to automation because of its internet and data-driven nature. While the companies still need humans to run several key functions, AI-run companies are a reality.

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