\n<\/p>\n
While Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn was loudly criticized this year after declaring that Duolingo would become an \u201cAI-first company,\u201d he suggested in a new interview the real issue was that he \u201cdid not give enough context.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cInternally, this was not controversial,\u201d von Ahn told The New York Times. \u201cExternally, as a publicly traded company some people assume that it\u2019s just for profit. Or that we\u2019re trying to lay off humans. And that was not the intent at all.\u201d<\/p>\n
On the contrary, von Ahn said the company has \u201cnever laid off any full-time employees\u201d and has no intention of doing so. And while he didn\u2019t deny that Duolingo had cut its contractor workforce, he suggested that \u201cfrom the beginning \u2026 our contractor workforce has gone up and down depending on needs.\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite the criticism (which does not seem to have made a big impact on Duolingo\u2019s bottom line), von Ahn still sounds extremely bullish about A.I.\u2019s potential, with Duolingo team members taking every Friday morning to experiment with the technology.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a bad acronym, f-r-A-I-days,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t know how to pronounce it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
While Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn was loudly criticized this year after declaring that Duolingo would become an \u201cAI-first company,\u201d he suggested in a new interview the real issue was that he \u201cdid not give enough context.\u201d \u201cInternally, this was not controversial,\u201d von Ahn told The New York Times. \u201cExternally, as a publicly traded company<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16329,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[3277,1044,9695,5031,9696],"class_list":{"0":"post-16328","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-ceo","9":"tag-controversial","10":"tag-duolingo","11":"tag-memo","12":"tag-misunderstood"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16328","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16328"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16328\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/16329"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}