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Image: Jonah Rosenberg for Fast Company
At a recent Apple event, the tech giant unveiled that Airpods will now be able to offer live translation abilities, powered by AI.
Shares of Duolingo, the language-learning company, dropped nearly 3% that afternoon in response. (Google also added a similar feature to its Google Translate app in August.)
But Luis von Ahn, Duolingo’s cofounder and CEO, isn’t really worried that real-time translation will be a threat to his business. For one, real-time translation isn’t a totally new technology, he says.
“About 10 years ago, Google did their event, Google IO, and demoed live translation . . . Nine years ago, they did an event again, and what they demoed was live translation. Eight years ago, they did an event, and demoed live translation,” von Ahn said on Tuesday, speaking at the Fast Company Innovation Festival in New York.
These announcements have been happening since Duolingo has been a public company, and its stock will dip, he said, and then bounce back.
Von Ahn also doesn’t think live translation is appealing to Duolingo users. The app’s users generally fall into two big buckets, he noted, the first being the those who are learning English.
“They actually want to learn English,” he said. “Phone translation is just not going to do it for them.”
The other big bucket are people who use Duolingo to learn a language as a hobby. “Just like chess,” von Ahn said. (Duolingo added chess to its lesson lineup earlier this year). “And computers have been better at playing chess than humans since 1997. People are still learning chess.”
It’s not that von Ahn is against AI. Duolingo has been leaning into the tech, too. In a staff memo von Ahn wrote back in May, he detailed how the company would become “AI-first.” That memo sent off a wave of backlash, as people took it to mean that the company would be replacing its human employees with artificial intelligence.
Von Ahn called that “misinformation.”
“We have not laid off a single full-time employee,” now or in the history of the company, he said. (And Duolingo has actually been hiring since that announcement.) But employees are using AI to do more work.
To teach a language through its app, Duolingo offers users lots of different course content—sentences to translate, short stories to read, cartoons to watch. That’s all always been created with a combination of human work and automation.
“As time has passed, more and more has been automated,” von Ahn said. “So now, with the same number of people, we can make four or five times as much content in the same amount of time.”
The addition of chess is one example. Two Duolingo employees started that project, and neither were engineers—or knew how to play chess. Instead, the designer and project manager duo spent six months using AI to “vibecode.” Once the interactions reached a certain level, they added engineers to the team.
“The whole thing was done from scratch to launch in nine months by a team that was at first just two people, and by the time they launched, it was only six,” von Ahn said. “And now . . . there’s millions and millions of users.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kristin Toussaint is a staff editor for Fast Company’s Impact section, where she covers climate change, labor, shareholder capitalism, and all sorts of innovations meant to improve the world.. On the topic of climate change, she has explained terms including cloud brightening, plastic credits, and renewable natural gas, and told the story of climate solutions, like how Maine got more than 100,000 residents to install heat pumps