Duolingo CEO says controversial AI memo was misunderstood

While Luis von Ahn, CEO of Duolingo, was loudly criticized this year after he stated that Duolingo would become an ‘first company’, he suggested in a new interview that the real problem was that he ‘did not give sufficient context’.

“This was not controversial internally,” Von Ahn told the New York Times. “Externally, as a listed company, some people assume that it is only for profit. Or that we try to fire people. And that was not the intention at all.”

On the contrary, Von Ahn said that the company “never fired full -time employees” and that does not intend to do this. And although he did not deny that Duolingo had lowered the contractor’s workforce, he suggested that “from the start … our contractor staff went up and down, depending on the needs.”

Despite the criticism (which does not seem to have had a major impact on the Bottom Line of Duolingo), Von Ahn still sounds extremely bullish about the potential of AI, where Duolingo Team members take every Friday morning to experiment with technology.

“It’s a bad acronym, Frai-Days,” he said. “I don’t know how to pronounce it.”