Billionaire Drinks Margaritas and Forecasts

AI Will Displace the Most Needy Workers

 

 

“It’s a tough situation that’ll affect the poor, the less educated.”

Updated to make clear that instead of terminating full-time employees, Duolingo fired contractors.
The creator of the well-known language-learning program Duolingo is unafraid of the automation of work in the AI era.
According to Forbes, Luis von Ahn, the company’s creator and CEO, is even open to talking about the dire possibility of widespread layoffs brought on by the introduction of AI tools while sipping margaritas and eating tacos with al pastor.

In January, the business terminated the contracts of contractors who were supposed to devise new methods to frame translations.

Unsurprisingly, the changes were in large part thanks to the advent of AI.
“Generative AI is accelerating our work by helping us create new content dramatically faster,” von Ahn wrote in a November shareholder letter.

And while a “full time employee’s job is very hard to automate,” he told Forbes over a meal at Duolingo’s Mexican restaurant, designed to have diners practice their Spanish, “we had some hourly contractors who were doing pretty rote stuff.”

Sorry Poor People

 

The billionaire tech founder also had some thoughts about how AI could affect the rest of the world.

“It’s a tough situation that’ll affect the poor, the less educated,” he said to Forbes. “And not just in the US, but in poor countries.”
Since the beginning, Von Ahn has been a steadfast supporter of artificial intelligence, even suggesting that computers may someday be more effective teachers than humans.

Most recently, his firm unveiled a video chat tool driven by AI that lets users perfect their language abilities by having conversations with Lily, the company’s mascot.

In fact, if Lily were to ever go “haywire” or “get into, say, I don’t know, some Nazi stuff,” like several AI chatbots before it, the CEO told Forbes that he’s “prepared” for someday having to “stick our foot in our mouth.”

Von Ahn’s unquestioning faith in technology is a sign of a larger, concerning trend in which tech executives are salivating to deploy AI to replace human labor. Since the introduction of OpenAI‘s ChatGPT in late 2022, there has been a lot of heated discussion on the subject; last year, Goldman Sachs estimated that 300 million jobs might be at risk.

Furthermore, other millionaire founders like Von Ahn won’t be facing layoffs anytime soon, as he is ready to acknowledge. Rather, the people who are less fortunate will probably be the ones let go first.

It is unclear whether DuoLingo’s heavy reliance on AI will pay off for its users. Experts don’t think AI could ever take the role of manual tutors, with the University of Michigan’s Marsal Family School of Education dean Elizabeth Birr Moje telling Forbes that AI “cannot see if a student is experiencing frustration. It cannot see body language. It cannot see joy.”