"It’s a tough situation that'll affect the poor, the less educated."

Let Them Eat Tacos

Updated to clarify that Duolingo terminated contractors rather than firing full-time workers.

The person running the popular language learning app Duolingo isn't afraid of job automation in the age of AI.

In fact, CEO and founder Luis von Ahn is willing to discuss the gloomy prospect of mass layoffs caused by the advent of AI tools while enjoying "bites of al pastor tacos and sips of a margarita," as Forbes reports.

The company has already cut off contractors tasked with coming up with alternative ways to phrase translations in January.

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 told Forbes. "And not just in the US, but in poor countries."

Von Ahn has been staunchly pro-AI from the get-go, going as far as to say that AI could eventually make computers better teachers than people.

Most recently, his company released an AI-powered video chat feature that allows users to converse with a mascot called Lily to practice their language skills.

The CEO even told Forbes that he's "prepared" for eventually having to "stick our foot in our mouth" if Lily were to ever go "haywire" or "getting into, say, I don’t know, some Nazi stuff," like some AI chatbots before it.

Von Ahn's blind trust in the tech is symptomatic of a much greater and worrying trend, with tech leaders frothing at the mouth to replace human workers with AI. The heated debate surrounding the topic has persisted since the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT in late 2022, with Goldman Sachs estimating last year that 300 million jobs could be on the chopping block.

And as Von Ahn's willing to admit, those layoffs won't be coming for other billionaire founders like him any time soon. Instead, it'll be the far less privileged who are likely the first to be let go.

Whether DuoLingo's all-in on AI will result in tangible benefits to its users remains to be seen. Experts doubt that AI could ever replace human 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."

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