Duolingo CEO says controversial AI memo was misunderstood

While Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn was loudly criticized this year after declaring that Duolingo would become an “AI-first company,” he suggested in a new interview the real issue was that he “did not give enough context.”

“Internally, this was not controversial,” von Ahn told The New York Times. “Externally, as a publicly traded company some people assume that it’s just for profit. Or that we’re trying to lay off humans. And that was not the intent at all.”

On the contrary, von Ahn said the company has “never laid off any full-time employees” and has no intention of doing so. And while he didn’t deny that Duolingo had cut its contractor workforce, he suggested that “from the beginning … our contractor workforce has gone up and down depending on needs.”

Despite the criticism (which does not seem to have made a big impact on Duolingo’s bottom line), von Ahn still sounds extremely bullish about A.I.’s potential, with Duolingo team members taking every Friday morning to experiment with the technology.

“It’s a bad acronym, f-r-A-I-days,” he said. “I don’t know how to pronounce it.”