Whereas Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn was loudly criticized this yr after declaring that Duolingo would develop into an “AI-first firm,” he advised in a brand new interview the true problem was that he “didn’t give sufficient context.”
“Internally, this was not controversial,” von Ahn instructed The New York Occasions. “Externally, as a publicly traded firm some folks assume that it’s only for revenue. Or that we’re making an attempt to put off people. And that was not the intent in any respect.”
Quite the opposite, von Ahn mentioned the corporate has “by no means laid off any full-time staff” and has no intention of doing so. And whereas he didn’t deny that Duolingo had minimize its contractor workforce, he advised that “from the start … our contractor workforce has gone up and down relying on wants.”
Regardless of the criticism (which doesn’t appear to have made a huge impact on Duolingo’s backside line), von Ahn nonetheless sounds extraordinarily bullish about A.I.’s potential, with Duolingo staff members taking each Friday morning to experiment with the know-how.
“It’s a foul acronym, f-r-A-I-days,” he mentioned. “I don’t know the right way to pronounce it.”
