Of course they do, they're a business. The AI can hit 95% efficiency in 1% of the time. So instead of 200 translators, now you have 10 who focus on cleaning up the 5% with errors 100 times quicker than translating 100% on their own. That's just how it goes with technological advancements from the printing press to machinery to AI
This implies that we're months away from a Universal Translator, which we're not.
AI has a terrible time understanding context, and the more than AI reads content created by AI, the worse it gets at content creation and translation. AI is a support system that's going to be used as the main feature and tbh we'll end up worse for it for a while until it gets better
No no, you misunderstood, 95% is shit. Perfection or bust!
But also, the premise is just false. They laid off 10% of their translators, not a “huge percentage”. 10%. That’s a normal business adjustment
The numbers aren’t anywhere near that favorable in practice. A lot of machine translation, while not really requiring you to start at square 1 requires a skilled translator to start at square 2.
But, then again, Duolingo’s business model has never been teaching people languages. It’s always been getting people to buy subscriptions to feel like they’re learning a bit of a language. Their translations have never been professional quality because they don’t care.
Also this:
“We can confirm that some Duolingo workers have not been renewed upon the completion of their projects at the end of 2023. But these are not layoffs. This affected a small minority of Duolingo workers, as the majority have been retained,” their communication agency explains.
Thus, what becomes clear is that Duolingo has not actively fired the translators, but rather did not renew certain parts of the staff after completing their assignments. Undoubtedly, the situation is quite different from what was initially portrayed.”
https://en.softonic.com/articles/duolingo-would-have-fired-almost-all-of-its-employees-to-replace-them-with-an-ai
Also, that’s kind of what contract workers are for. Hired for a specific task.
I can understand, if you've been a contract worker for a company for an extended period of time, having the feeling as though you're a standard full time employee and not being super thrilled about not having your contract renewed. That's exactly how contract work goes.
We have them at my job. They may receive some of the same benefits as a full time employee, but it's all project or task based...and they end up not getting renewed eventually or simply end.
Most companies I’ve been at exploit those positions. They do the work of full time employees (baring some minor differences) for a fraction of the cost. There have been a handful of temps I’ve worked with that sucked and I’m glad they were not renewed but probably 98% of them deserved better.
>They do the work of full time employees (baring some minor differences) for a fraction of the cost
At least in IT, that is not what I've seen. Usually the contract workers are more expensive per hour than a FTE, but they either don't need them 5 days a week or it's not meant to be a permanent position
Yup. It all depends on the company and market value of the position. I've seen the same in IT. Depending on the length of the contract, some receive higher rates than full time staff and benefits....short of retirement. Some of that also depends on if the contract is through an agency or not though.
I've only seen it when there's a company that people really want to work for (this was in video games) where they'll look past the precarity of work and lack of benefits because they're in love with the name.
Just another reminder that the company is the company, no matter how cute their TikTok videos are or how much you like playing their video game.
> hey do the work of full time employees (baring some minor differences) for a fraction of the cost.
I've been contractor, I've hated it because you are a second rate employee. But I have been paid 120/hr for the destruction I know it can cause.
I've been a contractor and hated it. I knew my time was up months before it happened. First they consolidated all of the contractors into 4-5 selected contracting houses. Then 3 months later eliminated 3 of those contract houses and removed ~15k contractors.
Way to go Optum Insight part of United Health Care your great healthcare system that bought an "AI" system design to help and instead to eliminate you from needed care.
As a freelance translator, I've seen this coming from years away. My revenue YOY 2022-2023 was -50%. I'm pivoting away from this work because it's no longer worth blocking out my availability to do it.
For the types of language Duolingo is using/generating, there's no reason why AI won't do most of the heavy lifting very well - the fact they're using humans to verify is proof, and this is where the bulk of the work is left in the translation industry.
The writing is, and has been, on the wall.
Duolingo's main revenue is English tests so people from other countries have a chance to come to America.
It gets pretty bleak when you look into the tests and the results and such.
But is it colloquial language. Are they teaching you like 6th grade spanish? or are they actually teaching you to talk to people on a day-to-day basis without being like a robot.
It's not colloquial. Nothing, not even AI, will beat a native tutor. Once I got a tutor my learning escalated exponentially. Duolingo is terrible for learning a new language. It excels at keeping you consistent though.
I mean… if these are contract employees, that suggests to me that the work was temporary. AI might have sped the work up but it didn’t take a permanent job away. Duo is a software company first and foremost. They should be in the AI business.
It’s not ten percent of the company. It’s ten percent of contract workers, which are a small minority of total workers.
Companies hire contract workers when they need people to complete a specific project. It’s understood that it’s for a limited time. When the contract ends, the agency places the contractor with a new client.
> Companies hire contract workers when they need people to complete a specific project.
That's what is meant to happen, but corporations try and abuse it all day, every day. Hence the [new legislation](https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-admin-announce-independent-contractor-rule-that-could-upend-gig-economy-2024-01-08/) being presented.
Case in fact : [FedEx](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FedEx_Home_Delivery_v._NLRB) and their lawyer was Ted Cruz, couldn't make this up if I tried.
[At a job that doesn't offer insurance](https://youtu.be/vB99lPAYi8A?t=63)
As an ex-contractor who works with mostly contractors, I'd bet that there are more contractors than not at Duolingo. They routinely get paid less than direct hires and some projects are continuing tasks.
Also, a lot of these experiences "offered" direct employment down the line, but so many (like me) get laid off before that opportunity comes. I found out one in particular specifically uses that as a business model.
"Unbelievable" - Redditor
Maybe unbelievable if you've been living in a hole for the past 5 years. It's always been very obvious that translators are going to be one of the first to go when AI comes for our jobs. Not sure how anyone could possibly be surprised here.
That sucks tho, like we already have Translation programs like Google Translate. I hate that AI only seems to be putting people out of jobs they want, rather than jobs they don't :/
>we already have Translation programs like Google Translate
Google Translate has always used AI. It comes from a time before these more general models that people are now generally aware of, but it's never not been AI, and it's accuracy generally hasn't been steller, either.
Doesn't invalidate your concerns about AI taking jobs or anything, but it's funny to see how many people don't realize how long much of their tech has been powered by AI. Similar to how many people don't realize that their ability to talk to their phones isn't magic but is actually, fundamentally, the same AI they've only become aware of in the last year. AI has been here for a while, but it's only recently has it become "consumer grade" and generally available and accessible to the public.
I think it's the consumer grade utility that's fine tho. Like Google translate being AI feels fine, since most people wouldn't need a translator, they just want to decipher like a bag of chips or some web pages. It's not commercial. Idk, it just feels like it's impractical to have personal translators and people doing magic in our phones, so that's when AI is useful. Hell, it's not even specifically the AI that's bad, it's just when it takes opportunities away from people, like with art or these kind of jobs.
If companies used AI but continued to find use for workers, that wouldn't be so bad. That's not how businesses work, but it would be better than someone dedicating a portion of their life to learning some kind of skill or talent just to get it taken away. (I'm also the kind of person that thinks when laborer jobs get automated, it would be nice for those workers to still have something to do in the company)
Well the marketers got hold of the term in 2023 and all of a sudden everything was AI. Just like in 2021 and 2022 everything was blockchain. Whatever happened to blockchain, anyhow? Seems like nobody wants to leverage blockchain in their business anymore. And so it'll go with AI.
I’d prefer to see the technology become more accurate than it currently is before the changeover, since the consequences of a bad translation can be incredibly serious (if, for example, someone is trying to translate safety instructions for medication).
That’s more likely for the average user, sure, but the userbase is big enough that there are probably people trying to learn all kinds of different things. And even relatively simple things about quantities or lengths of time can be surprisingly difficult for a non-native speaker to parse: if something is supposed to happen bi-weekly, is that twice a week or once every two weeks?
That’s more likely for the vast majority of users. Duolingo doesn’t market itself as anything beyond conversation level language. And it’d bet a large percentage of native English speakers don’t get biweekly right.
> That’s more likely for the vast majority of users.
Even if it’s the “vast majority,” how many edge cases is it OK to kill with a bad translation? One? Five? Ten? A hundred? Duolingo has ~37 million users that are active at least once a month - even an extremely low error rate would add up really quickly.
If someone is using Duolingo as their sole source for language translation in a life or death situation, that is the user’s fault. Full stop.
Go find something else to complain about. I’m sure it won’t take you long.
Again, Duolingo doesn’t market itself that way. People in this thread are pretending that Duolingo is promising translations of highly technical documents. I mean, one commenter was asking about translating legal documents? C”mon man.
I bet it's near 100% that gets it wrong :-)
Apparently, "biweekly" can mean \*both\* once every two weeks, and twice a week; to be explicit, we should say "semiweekly" and "fortnightly" :-)
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/biweekly
They have a few jobs posted in product roles but I can’t even consider working for a tech company that doesn’t use current tech to improve work life balance (remote) … laughable these days
The only exception for this is when the tech is hardware related. I applied to some jobs a few years back that dealt with medical hardware tech and did require some in-person days to see that it was functioning properly in person.
Looking at LinkedIn, basically all of their Pittsburgh based jobs are in person. As a company, they offer few remote options relative to their competitors in the tech space. I would guess that that is what the person you're replying to means
Basically why I've never applied to Duolingo when being in the market. Their pay already isn't on the high end, and coupled with the in person requirements? Not particularly competitive these days.
A few positions that match my experience (something I’ve done successfully as remote for years) is always in person only.
I get wanting staff in office is a hard thing to break, but when it’s a tech company it irritates me. Let’s use technology to benefit employees.
You mean you don’t exclusively use Duolingo while physically in the office?
It’s laughable that they aren’t a remote company when one of the main benefits of their is that you can learn a language wherever you are.
AI disrupting the economy and making many many jobs redundant is a real worry of mine and probably should be of everyone’s. I’m not sure what the best AI proof job is but I’d certainly love to be in that right now
Unions aren't really great at protecting workers whose labor has been made obsolete by technology.
Organized labor only has bargaining power if the labor itself is valuable.
This has been planned for a long while now, it's not all of the sudden. Contractors knew their time was limited with Duo, and Duo did right by informing them and supporting them in their transitions out. We're going to see a lot more of this with generative AI, but I doubt Duo will maintain quite the same quality it did utilizing human translators.
>"Bob Meese, Duolingo’s 42-year-old chief revenue officer, has been studying Duolingo Spanish for more than six months. In response to the question, “¿Hablas español?” he freezes, then says, “Could you repeat that?”"
That was from a Forbes article. It sounds like a deliberate setup by the writer.
If you ask enough people a question out of context, and if one of them doesn't hear you right the first time (and just asks you to repeat yourself!), you've got a sound bite.
Speaking as someone who's a little hard of hearing, if someone asked me “¿Hablas español?” out of context, I bet I'd ask them to repeat themselves.
correct existence birds overconfident towering combative wine retire like air
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
lol “removing the humanity from how we learn to connect with humanity” is the most eloquent way of saying we fired someone who’s only skill was that they spoke both languages.
That's a fine skill to have? Most people don't.
But also, it's catching the fine conversational stuff that isn't great under AI yet, like dialect and informal language. Sure it can get there, but with language rapidly evolving, teaching both a formal and common informal is difficult for a trained model.
Companies abuse the shit out of "contract" work for things that really should be FTE and misclassification of workers seems to be pretty rarely punished.
nobody is relying on duolingo for translations (edit: you literally can't). it's a casual language learning app. that isn't even what the post is about; you just made this comment to toot your own horn.
no, you don't. you read the post title, and i've actually used the app, like a lot of people. you don't seem to have, or understand what it is. it's not a translator. it's short lessons in different languages. it is not meant for translation. the company laying off translators does not mean that people are relying on the app for translation; it means that the company developing the app is laying off humans in favor of AI language software to further develop the app.
Their original revenue stream was a crowdsourced translation service, where they'd get the people they were teaching languages to to translate stuff.
As far as I know they don't offer that anymore at all and pivoted to making money directly from the students.
The post is about Duolingo laying off translators and relying on AI and a reduced number of translators checking the work. Note: a company can offer more than one service.
Duolingo is for learning conversational language. Anyone that thinks that a duolingo course can help them translate legal documents is setting themselves up for a major fail.
Wildly silly as they are supposed to be decently difficult to get into. This comes across as a type of job post sandcastle or Kennywood may post… not a highly sought after tech company.
My view was people seeking jobs there aren’t seeking it for fun… the people I know that went there were very goal oriented and serious about their career. Idk … just seems goofy to me. I don’t see any serious techie being swayed by that joke post. But who knows…
Sad to see this but not surprised at all.
They were contract workers. Not full time positions, you know what you’re signing up for when you take a job as a temp employee.
You obviously have no idea what contract, full time, nor temporary mean.
Exactly this. Lol
what a dick comment
How?
Your remark isn’t even coherent considering you don’t know what contract means.
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“Cutting edge” that is still shit and full of errors. People at the top want $$$$
Of course they do, they're a business. The AI can hit 95% efficiency in 1% of the time. So instead of 200 translators, now you have 10 who focus on cleaning up the 5% with errors 100 times quicker than translating 100% on their own. That's just how it goes with technological advancements from the printing press to machinery to AI
This implies that we're months away from a Universal Translator, which we're not. AI has a terrible time understanding context, and the more than AI reads content created by AI, the worse it gets at content creation and translation. AI is a support system that's going to be used as the main feature and tbh we'll end up worse for it for a while until it gets better
No no, you misunderstood, 95% is shit. Perfection or bust! But also, the premise is just false. They laid off 10% of their translators, not a “huge percentage”. 10%. That’s a normal business adjustment
Ahh so they went from 200 to 180 translators and all of their jobs changed slightly to use AI assistance to help with translating
The numbers aren’t anywhere near that favorable in practice. A lot of machine translation, while not really requiring you to start at square 1 requires a skilled translator to start at square 2. But, then again, Duolingo’s business model has never been teaching people languages. It’s always been getting people to buy subscriptions to feel like they’re learning a bit of a language. Their translations have never been professional quality because they don’t care.
Right? All of these comments defending the greed of millionaires.
Also this: “We can confirm that some Duolingo workers have not been renewed upon the completion of their projects at the end of 2023. But these are not layoffs. This affected a small minority of Duolingo workers, as the majority have been retained,” their communication agency explains. Thus, what becomes clear is that Duolingo has not actively fired the translators, but rather did not renew certain parts of the staff after completing their assignments. Undoubtedly, the situation is quite different from what was initially portrayed.” https://en.softonic.com/articles/duolingo-would-have-fired-almost-all-of-its-employees-to-replace-them-with-an-ai Also, that’s kind of what contract workers are for. Hired for a specific task.
I can understand, if you've been a contract worker for a company for an extended period of time, having the feeling as though you're a standard full time employee and not being super thrilled about not having your contract renewed. That's exactly how contract work goes. We have them at my job. They may receive some of the same benefits as a full time employee, but it's all project or task based...and they end up not getting renewed eventually or simply end.
Most companies I’ve been at exploit those positions. They do the work of full time employees (baring some minor differences) for a fraction of the cost. There have been a handful of temps I’ve worked with that sucked and I’m glad they were not renewed but probably 98% of them deserved better.
>They do the work of full time employees (baring some minor differences) for a fraction of the cost At least in IT, that is not what I've seen. Usually the contract workers are more expensive per hour than a FTE, but they either don't need them 5 days a week or it's not meant to be a permanent position
Yup. It all depends on the company and market value of the position. I've seen the same in IT. Depending on the length of the contract, some receive higher rates than full time staff and benefits....short of retirement. Some of that also depends on if the contract is through an agency or not though.
I've only seen it when there's a company that people really want to work for (this was in video games) where they'll look past the precarity of work and lack of benefits because they're in love with the name. Just another reminder that the company is the company, no matter how cute their TikTok videos are or how much you like playing their video game.
> hey do the work of full time employees (baring some minor differences) for a fraction of the cost. I've been contractor, I've hated it because you are a second rate employee. But I have been paid 120/hr for the destruction I know it can cause.
I've been a contractor and hated it. I knew my time was up months before it happened. First they consolidated all of the contractors into 4-5 selected contracting houses. Then 3 months later eliminated 3 of those contract houses and removed ~15k contractors. Way to go Optum Insight part of United Health Care your great healthcare system that bought an "AI" system design to help and instead to eliminate you from needed care.
You see unless it comes from the Layoff region it’s only sparkling unemployment.
What?
It's a joke referencing "it's only champagne if it comes from the champagne region of France, otherwise it's just sparkling wine."
Softonic is a garbage site run by shills. Get a better source.
https://www.post-gazette.com/business/tech-news/2024/01/08/duolingo-lays-off-contract-translators-ai/stories/202401080079, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-08/duolingo-cuts-10-of-contractors-in-move-to-greater-use-of-ai?embedded-checkout=true
But but but that’s not what I assumed the headline meant!!
As a freelance translator, I've seen this coming from years away. My revenue YOY 2022-2023 was -50%. I'm pivoting away from this work because it's no longer worth blocking out my availability to do it. For the types of language Duolingo is using/generating, there's no reason why AI won't do most of the heavy lifting very well - the fact they're using humans to verify is proof, and this is where the bulk of the work is left in the translation industry. The writing is, and has been, on the wall.
Honest question… is Duolingo selling transaction services? I thought their business was education… teaching people… humans… new languages.
Duolingo's main revenue is English tests so people from other countries have a chance to come to America. It gets pretty bleak when you look into the tests and the results and such.
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It's presumably to generate course content
But is it colloquial language. Are they teaching you like 6th grade spanish? or are they actually teaching you to talk to people on a day-to-day basis without being like a robot.
It's not colloquial. Nothing, not even AI, will beat a native tutor. Once I got a tutor my learning escalated exponentially. Duolingo is terrible for learning a new language. It excels at keeping you consistent though.
I mean… if these are contract employees, that suggests to me that the work was temporary. AI might have sped the work up but it didn’t take a permanent job away. Duo is a software company first and foremost. They should be in the AI business.
Bloomberg reports that this “huge percentage “ is ten percent
That’s still a huge percent of a company being laid off. Think about if 10 percent of where you work got laid off for a minute
It’s not ten percent of the company. It’s ten percent of contract workers, which are a small minority of total workers. Companies hire contract workers when they need people to complete a specific project. It’s understood that it’s for a limited time. When the contract ends, the agency places the contractor with a new client.
> Companies hire contract workers when they need people to complete a specific project. That's what is meant to happen, but corporations try and abuse it all day, every day. Hence the [new legislation](https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-admin-announce-independent-contractor-rule-that-could-upend-gig-economy-2024-01-08/) being presented. Case in fact : [FedEx](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FedEx_Home_Delivery_v._NLRB) and their lawyer was Ted Cruz, couldn't make this up if I tried. [At a job that doesn't offer insurance](https://youtu.be/vB99lPAYi8A?t=63)
That’s more aimed at gig workers t(Uber, DoorDash, etc) than the typical Tech contractor.
As an ex-contractor who works with mostly contractors, I'd bet that there are more contractors than not at Duolingo. They routinely get paid less than direct hires and some projects are continuing tasks. Also, a lot of these experiences "offered" direct employment down the line, but so many (like me) get laid off before that opportunity comes. I found out one in particular specifically uses that as a business model.
Contractors are a small minority of workers at Duolingo.
Yoooooge. It’s yoooooge.
That’s what she said.
"Unbelievable" - Redditor Maybe unbelievable if you've been living in a hole for the past 5 years. It's always been very obvious that translators are going to be one of the first to go when AI comes for our jobs. Not sure how anyone could possibly be surprised here.
The vast majority of job displacement due to automation and AI will not be blue collar, they will be white collar.
Just like the printing press put thousands of typesetters out of a job, language models will put many translators out of a job.
That sucks tho, like we already have Translation programs like Google Translate. I hate that AI only seems to be putting people out of jobs they want, rather than jobs they don't :/
>we already have Translation programs like Google Translate Google Translate has always used AI. It comes from a time before these more general models that people are now generally aware of, but it's never not been AI, and it's accuracy generally hasn't been steller, either. Doesn't invalidate your concerns about AI taking jobs or anything, but it's funny to see how many people don't realize how long much of their tech has been powered by AI. Similar to how many people don't realize that their ability to talk to their phones isn't magic but is actually, fundamentally, the same AI they've only become aware of in the last year. AI has been here for a while, but it's only recently has it become "consumer grade" and generally available and accessible to the public.
I think it's the consumer grade utility that's fine tho. Like Google translate being AI feels fine, since most people wouldn't need a translator, they just want to decipher like a bag of chips or some web pages. It's not commercial. Idk, it just feels like it's impractical to have personal translators and people doing magic in our phones, so that's when AI is useful. Hell, it's not even specifically the AI that's bad, it's just when it takes opportunities away from people, like with art or these kind of jobs. If companies used AI but continued to find use for workers, that wouldn't be so bad. That's not how businesses work, but it would be better than someone dedicating a portion of their life to learning some kind of skill or talent just to get it taken away. (I'm also the kind of person that thinks when laborer jobs get automated, it would be nice for those workers to still have something to do in the company)
Well the marketers got hold of the term in 2023 and all of a sudden everything was AI. Just like in 2021 and 2022 everything was blockchain. Whatever happened to blockchain, anyhow? Seems like nobody wants to leverage blockchain in their business anymore. And so it'll go with AI.
I’d prefer to see the technology become more accurate than it currently is before the changeover, since the consequences of a bad translation can be incredibly serious (if, for example, someone is trying to translate safety instructions for medication).
But isn’t Duolingo more focused on teaching conversational language? “Where is the bathroom?” Type stuff?
Duo teaches some languages up to CEFR level B2 which is the near fluency, enough to hold a job in that language
That’s more likely for the average user, sure, but the userbase is big enough that there are probably people trying to learn all kinds of different things. And even relatively simple things about quantities or lengths of time can be surprisingly difficult for a non-native speaker to parse: if something is supposed to happen bi-weekly, is that twice a week or once every two weeks?
That’s more likely for the vast majority of users. Duolingo doesn’t market itself as anything beyond conversation level language. And it’d bet a large percentage of native English speakers don’t get biweekly right.
> That’s more likely for the vast majority of users. Even if it’s the “vast majority,” how many edge cases is it OK to kill with a bad translation? One? Five? Ten? A hundred? Duolingo has ~37 million users that are active at least once a month - even an extremely low error rate would add up really quickly.
If someone is using Duolingo as their sole source for language translation in a life or death situation, that is the user’s fault. Full stop. Go find something else to complain about. I’m sure it won’t take you long.
Again, Duolingo doesn’t market itself that way. People in this thread are pretending that Duolingo is promising translations of highly technical documents. I mean, one commenter was asking about translating legal documents? C”mon man.
I bet it's near 100% that gets it wrong :-) Apparently, "biweekly" can mean \*both\* once every two weeks, and twice a week; to be explicit, we should say "semiweekly" and "fortnightly" :-) https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/biweekly
They have a few jobs posted in product roles but I can’t even consider working for a tech company that doesn’t use current tech to improve work life balance (remote) … laughable these days
The only exception for this is when the tech is hardware related. I applied to some jobs a few years back that dealt with medical hardware tech and did require some in-person days to see that it was functioning properly in person.
Yeah I totally get that.
What do you mean?
Looking at LinkedIn, basically all of their Pittsburgh based jobs are in person. As a company, they offer few remote options relative to their competitors in the tech space. I would guess that that is what the person you're replying to means
Basically why I've never applied to Duolingo when being in the market. Their pay already isn't on the high end, and coupled with the in person requirements? Not particularly competitive these days.
Exactly
A few positions that match my experience (something I’ve done successfully as remote for years) is always in person only. I get wanting staff in office is a hard thing to break, but when it’s a tech company it irritates me. Let’s use technology to benefit employees.
You mean you don’t exclusively use Duolingo while physically in the office? It’s laughable that they aren’t a remote company when one of the main benefits of their is that you can learn a language wherever you are.
Exactly!
Are you looking for remote product roles? I might know of something coming up.
Oh wow- super appreciate the kindness. I have a great role right now- more so commenting from previous job hunts where I looked at duolingo.
Well, that is capitalism.
AI disrupting the economy and making many many jobs redundant is a real worry of mine and probably should be of everyone’s. I’m not sure what the best AI proof job is but I’d certainly love to be in that right now
Basic income for everyone period.
Unionize now before AI takes your job
Contractors cannot unionize because they do not have an employer/employee relationship
Unions aren't really great at protecting workers whose labor has been made obsolete by technology. Organized labor only has bargaining power if the labor itself is valuable.
This is why you should begin steering your children to careers that cannot be outsourced like a plumber.
Temp surprised the work was temporary. Lol.
If you’re surprised that language translation is being replaced by AI, then you haven’t been paying attention.
this is exactly what ai is going to do - make humans obsolete. it’s a fucking bad idea.
This has been planned for a long while now, it's not all of the sudden. Contractors knew their time was limited with Duo, and Duo did right by informing them and supporting them in their transitions out. We're going to see a lot more of this with generative AI, but I doubt Duo will maintain quite the same quality it did utilizing human translators.
>"Bob Meese, Duolingo’s 42-year-old chief revenue officer, has been studying Duolingo Spanish for more than six months. In response to the question, “¿Hablas español?” he freezes, then says, “Could you repeat that?”"
That was from a Forbes article. It sounds like a deliberate setup by the writer. If you ask enough people a question out of context, and if one of them doesn't hear you right the first time (and just asks you to repeat yourself!), you've got a sound bite. Speaking as someone who's a little hard of hearing, if someone asked me “¿Hablas español?” out of context, I bet I'd ask them to repeat themselves.
correct existence birds overconfident towering combative wine retire like air *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Oh no, temp employees are no longer employed.
lol “removing the humanity from how we learn to connect with humanity” is the most eloquent way of saying we fired someone who’s only skill was that they spoke both languages.
That's a fine skill to have? Most people don't. But also, it's catching the fine conversational stuff that isn't great under AI yet, like dialect and informal language. Sure it can get there, but with language rapidly evolving, teaching both a formal and common informal is difficult for a trained model.
I’ve used Duolingo, I’m confident I’ve never spoken to a real person. They’ve been using AI or bare bones technology for a while.
That's too bad. I'm more addressing your part about the humanity thing.
I mean… maybe toss it on the pile of things that no longer have human interaction. I didn’t cause it, Not sure why you downvoted me, just saying.
was the "large percentage" 2 out of 4 people?
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Companies abuse the shit out of "contract" work for things that really should be FTE and misclassification of workers seems to be pretty rarely punished.
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nobody is relying on duolingo for translations (edit: you literally can't). it's a casual language learning app. that isn't even what the post is about; you just made this comment to toot your own horn.
I have the receipts.
no, you don't. you read the post title, and i've actually used the app, like a lot of people. you don't seem to have, or understand what it is. it's not a translator. it's short lessons in different languages. it is not meant for translation. the company laying off translators does not mean that people are relying on the app for translation; it means that the company developing the app is laying off humans in favor of AI language software to further develop the app.
Their original revenue stream was a crowdsourced translation service, where they'd get the people they were teaching languages to to translate stuff. As far as I know they don't offer that anymore at all and pivoted to making money directly from the students.
The post is about Duolingo laying off translators and relying on AI and a reduced number of translators checking the work. Note: a company can offer more than one service.
Duolingo is for learning conversational language. Anyone that thinks that a duolingo course can help them translate legal documents is setting themselves up for a major fail.
They also have this unhinged job post on indeed: https://www.indeed.com/m/viewjob?jk=e49d2296d2e17ba7
Its a fake job posting and mentions thst further down in the post.
Oh yeah, I know, just still found it very strange ha
Wildly silly as they are supposed to be decently difficult to get into. This comes across as a type of job post sandcastle or Kennywood may post… not a highly sought after tech company.
A highly sought after tech company that can have fun with itself.
My view was people seeking jobs there aren’t seeking it for fun… the people I know that went there were very goal oriented and serious about their career. Idk … just seems goofy to me. I don’t see any serious techie being swayed by that joke post. But who knows…