Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn is having major regrets after widely bragging about replacing human workers with AI.
Earlier this year, von Ahn boasted that the language learning app company would “gradually stop using contractors to do work that AI can handle.”
At the time, the CEO said that “we can’t wait until the technology is 100 percent perfect,” enthusing that “we’d rather move with urgency and take occasional small hits on quality than move slowly and miss the moment.”
His enthusiasm for the tech was followed by a massive outpouring of criticism. Furious users on TikTok announced they’d be deleting the app en masse, their multi-year “streak” of daily use be damned.
Bafflingly, the simmering anti-AI sentiment apparently caught von Ahn by surprise.
“I did not expect the amount of blowback,” he admitted in an new interview with the Financial Times, arguing that social media users had mischaracterized the changes as though “Duolingo has no employees, we have fired everyone and everything is being controlled by a massive AI.”
Of course, if AI were advanced enough to do that, his prior remarks suggest that he absolutely would. Tech companies have embraced AI tech at all costs, driven by massive hype surrounding the tech — and consumers are quickly growing wary and frustrated.
The race to replace human workers with tech hasn’t sat well with many, establishing an entire anti-AI movement. Consumers have bristled at companies stuffing AI into virtually every aspect of their digital lives. To many, it’s a race to the bottom, with AI automation undermining their livelihoods in exchange for dubious advancements in actual technical capabilities.
But despite plenty of warning signs, von Ahn, a Silicon Valley mainstay whose net worth is just shy of $2 billion, says he didn’t foresee the fallout.
Last month, von Ahn went into damage control mode, telling Fortune that “I do not see AI as replacing what our employees do” and walking back his earlier promises of using AI instead of contractors.
“I see it as a tool to accelerate what we do, at the same or better level of quality,” he added at the time. “And the sooner we learn how to use it, and use it responsibly, the better off we will be in the long run.”
This week, he told the FT that there will be a “very small number of hourly contractors who are doing repetitive tasks that we no longer need.”
“Many of these people are probably going to be offered contractor jobs for other stuff,” he added in an apparent attempt to extinguish the flames.
According to von Ahn, AI isn’t going anywhere, blowback or not — an unsurprising stance given his immense vested interest.
To the CEO, a “Black Mirror”-style dystopia where users get sucked into spending a “significant amount of time socially talking to AI” is “just inevitable,” he told the FT.
More on Duolingo: Duolingo Announces Plans to Replace as Many Human Workers as Possible With AI
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