Duolingo goes AI-first

Duolingo may have brought its owl mascot back to life, but there’s no bringing back the jobs lost to AI. The company’s CEO just announced they’re “going to become AI-first,” when according to Blood in the Machine author Brian Merchant, they already are. Translators and writers were let go months ago.

From Merchant’s piece on Substack, The AI jobs crisis is here, now:

Well, I have bad news. The AI jobs crisis has arrived. It’s here, right now. It just doesn’t look quite like many expected it to.

The AI jobs crisis does not, as I’ve written before, look like sentient programs arising all around us, inexorably replacing human jobs en masse. It’s a series of management decisions being made by executives seeking to cut labor costs and consolidate control in their organizations. The AI jobs crisis is not any sort of SkyNet-esque robot jobs apocalypse—it’s DOGE firing tens of thousands of federal employees while waving the banner of “an AI-first strategy.”