While the general director of Duolingo Luis von Ahn was loudly criticized this year after he announced that Duolingo would become “AI-First”, he suggested in a new interview that the real problem was that he “did not give a sufficient number of context.”
“It was not controversial internally” von ahn said the New York Times. “Externally, as a publicly recorded company, some people assume that it is only for profit. Or that we try to slow down people. And it was not intentions at all.”
On the contrary, von Ahn said that the company “has never filed full -time employees” and is not going to do it. And although he did not deny that Duolingo had reduced the working strength of the contractor, he suggested that “from the very beginning … our contractor's working strength increased depending on the needs.”
Despite the criticism (which seems to have not had a large impact on the lower line of Duolingo), von Ahn still sounds extremely stubborn in relation to the potential of AI, and members of the Duoling team experiment with technology every Friday morning.
“It's a bad acronym, frai,” he said. “I don't know how to pronounce it.”
