A week after declaring that AI would eventually replace contract workers at the language-learning app, Duolingo’s CEO said the company was “continuing to hire” and would support its existing workers in getting up to speed on the technology.
It follows buzzy startup Klarna in backing off an AI-first promise.
Luis von Ahn, co-founder and CEO, took to LinkedIn on Thursday to walk back a previous stance pushing AI use over human employees.
Because anyone that’s tried to use an LLM for more than shits and giggles knows they’re unreliable, finicky golden geese.
My rule with Claude is that if I can’t get a code fix after 3 asks, it’s hallucinating too much and I have to pull my shit into a new instance and start with new prompts. Yes, that’s a temporary problem that will last 2 years max, but its not enough on which to be totally overhauling the global economy today.
It’s really not a temporary problem. LLMs hallucinate by design, they’re just pattern recognition engines. They’re always going to be like this and we need to develop totally different tools for more rigorous tasks. This particular technology is a dead end, I think.
Exactly - LLMs by definition don’t know or understand the meaning of the words they’re saying. That technology can never yield something intelligent.
It’s temporary in the sense that 2 years ago, this stuff barely worked. We might be at a plateau of compute, but Deep Seek did highlight that gains may be possible through design rather than compute.
This is not the end of history. In even 5 years what we’re all using now will be cringe garbage.