• by Colin Kirkland , January 8, 2024

Duolingo, the popular language-learning app, has laid off around 10% of its contractors while increasing the utilization of artificial intelligence (AI) features to create new content for its platform.

Duolingo is no stranger to AI, having launched AI chatbots in 2016 and Open-AI's ChatGPT 4 last year, but this marks the first time there may have been jobs lost at the company because of it.

“We just no longer need as many people to do the type of work some of these contractors were doing,” a company spokesperson told Bloomberg. “Part of that could be attributed to AI.”

The spokesperson, who did not attribute the layoffs to AI outright, said the job reduction is not a “straight replacement” of workers due to AI usage. Many of the company’s full-time employees and contractors use AI technology in their daily work.

Like many app developers, Duolingo has been increasing its investment in AI over the past year. In a November letter to shareholders, chief executive officer Luis von Ahn said the company would use generative AI to create “new content dramatically faster,” including scripts to shows that help teach users languages, character voices, and feedback for premium subscribers.

The company has been working on expanding its educational offerings, with new lessons in music and mathematics.

None of the company’s 600 full-time employees were affected by this recent job cuts, but it underscores the fears many professionals have about generative AI replacing them, or making their positions obsolete.

In June, the online homework-helper Chegg, announced that it will be cutting 4% of its workforce and figuring out how to incorporate generative AI into its tutoring services.

Recent moves made by some major tech companies have not quelled suspicions around the possibility of job cuts either.

In November, for example, Amazon laid off hundreds of employees working on its Alex voice assistant unit in order to focus its resources and efforts on generative AI, which can create software code, intelligent text responses and more from short prompts.

After laying off 12,000 people last year, Google has new plans to further restructure and potentially consolidate its staff in its ad-sales unit, citing goals to use AI among its internal ad sales teams for tasks like scanning websites, automatically generating keywords, and creating headlines and images.