While the CEO of Duolingo, Luis Von Ahn, was criticized loudly this year after having declared that Duolingo would become an “company of the IA-First”, he suggested in a new interview, the real problem was that he “did not give enough context”.
“Internally, it was not controversial,” said Von Ahn to the New York Times. “External, as a listed company on the stock market, some people assume that it is only for a profit. Or that we are trying to dismiss humans. And that was not at all intention.”
On the contrary, Von Ahn said that the company had “never dismissed full -time employees” and had no intention of doing so. And even if he did not deny that Duolingo had reduced his entrepreneurial staff, he suggested that “from the start … Our entrepreneurial workforce has increased and lowered according to needs”.
Despite the criticisms (which do not seem to have had a big impact on the results of Duolingo), Von Ahn always seems extremely optimistic about the potential of the AI, the members of the Duolingo team taking every Friday morning to experiment with technology.
“It’s a bad acronym, Frai-Days,” he said. “I don’t know how to say it.”
