Luis von Ahn says criticism over strategy change shows ‘anxiety’ about technology replacing jobs
Archived version: https://archive.is/20250608171624/https://www.ft.com/content/6fbafbb6-bafe-484c-9af9-f0ffb589b447
Luis von Ahn says criticism over strategy change shows ‘anxiety’ about technology replacing jobs
Motherfucker, you’re the one that fired slews of employees to be replaced by text-prediction algorithms. It’s not “anxiety”, you’re fucking doing it.
Yeah, he learned nothing. He’s just upset that everyone didn’t agree with him.
He’s going to keep pushing the same nonsense as soon as the attention blows over, and he’ll be just as surprised when it goes bad.
CEOs are overall just not smart and we need to stop that belief
Is there really a single person of this belief, after the whole HBO name-change stupidity? That is still among the worst business and branding decisions I have ever seen.
I would argue that it is one of the most deeply held American beliefs even if it’s not talked about openly. Successful people are almost always viewed as intelligent by default. Despite all evidence to the contrary.
People STILL call Elon a genius ffs
“Well if they are so dumb why do they have so much money???”
”I’m out of touch with reality” - another dipshit rich guy.
That’s a plain and simple admission that you are incompetent at your job. You should resign not post puff pieces at FT…
I feel like the only job AI would be better suited at would be CEO.
I mean, they take in current hype, change a few words and then regurgitate it with slightly different words.
Nah let him keep it longer. I think the company sales can go lower
Lemme rephrase that for ya mate:
“I did not anticipate people getting angry that i turned the program into a complete steaming pile of useless shit”
It’s not the children who are wrong.
Anti-human little creep, I uninstalled and cancelled my subscription as soon as I heard the news
CEOs are rich enough to live in their own delusional bubble. They are very out of touch with the average person, or their own workforce. This is nothing new.
Fire that CEO, he’s an idiot.
If you have ever been to any major SLT or higher meeting, the phrases “This is the first time I am hearing about that” or “That’s not what was reported to me” come up so much that I’m amazed the meetings even finish on time. Plausible deniability of the name of the game.
I said “I sent a video recording of this a month ago and received confirmation. Do you not have that?” and got back “I never got that.”
“Alright, got it. Thankfully it’s not my problem anymore but you know where yours is.” and left it at that.
That’s true and this is not an example of such a situation, because he knew exactly what the reaction was going to be. He probably felt that he could ride that AI bubble away from it, but he knew the reaction was waiting for him.
The other thing about that claim, when it could possibly be credible, is it means that essentially the boss is not qualified to do their job. The one thing they should have done is been chatting with ordinary workers or customers to see what the actual needs are, and they’re admitting it to somehow deflect from a bad decision they made but in doing so they’ve unwittingly shown that they’re basically incompetent at their entire job.
I think you misunderstood my meaning. They know. They’ve known all along. They simply think that saying they don’t know and throwing everyone below them under the bus is fine because it’s accepted in the business culture here. The CEO is always right because even when they aren’t, bonus still gets deposited.
Better yet, replace them with ai. Don’t need to pay someone 300x of an average workers wage just to take bad decisions
AI could easily replace ceos
Seriously - LLMs are much more adequate to do a CEO’s job than an engineer’s. Maybe the crazied scramble to push AI “features” into products is to distract customers, workers and shareholders from this fact?
„AI is creating uncertainty for all of us, and we can respond to this with fear or curiosity.“
How about we respond to this with reason?
Way to reinforce the stereotype, out-of-touch rich dude. Most people who actually work for a living see no benefit from AI, and resent it being shoved into every single product, whether it makes sense or not. Oh well, at least you can burn boatloads of VC money while also destroying the environment and abusing intellectual property to train it!
LLM are actually moderatly useful in my line of work but I still think they are super unethical and terrible, ungodly things.
Cancelled my sub when I found that out. Switched to busuu, comparing the two, busuu and Duolingo seem to have different teachings and I noticed that my ability to understand things (comments) in duo is slowly becoming paywalled on the pro(paid) version… Wtf??! Quality of lessons is also seemingly going down.
Then I heard they are handing user data to ICE (maybe this is a rumor) but it just pushed me away even quicker.I don’t have proof of this so I take this back but am leaving the text so as to give context to the comments below.
They don’t appear to be sharing any data with ICE. The Mozilla Foundation issued a report saying defence contractors were assembling dossiers from publicly available data, including duolingo data.
https://cyberinsider.com/mozilla-calls-for-action-to-stop-surveillance-firms-data-scraping/
Ahhh. I see. So it was some what alarmist. I shall update my comment.
Try Language Transfer. It’s a very different approach from rote memorization.
It’s hardly surprising that these people are out of touch when they’re constantly surrounded in a bubble of yes-men, cultish AI sycophants, VC investors and other “dark enlightenment” enthusiasts.
It’s a pathology, really. A kind of shared delusion in service of global capital.
christ i hate the term “dark enlightenment” more and more it’s being used to be an “inevitable” and romanticised spin to reactionary bullshit, stupidity and panic
Of course he didn’t expect the blowback. All of the CEOs are in their own little worlds trying to figure out how to make money off of AI. They’re all taking their personal money and investing heavily in AI corporations, so they’re all very pro AI and couldn’t understand why your average person who is pretty sure it’s going to make their life worse through jobs or other means would be anti-AI.
Look at his old amas on Reddit to see what kind of guy he is. He’s always been a prick.
I looked through a few pages worth of his comments (in English and Spanish) and I didn’t pick up on that. Was there a particular response you were thinking about, or might it have been something that is now deleted?
Around the time they switched to more gamified pathing about two years ago he did not respond well to valid criticisms by people with disabilities in one of those AMAs and it is a major reason why I quit. I will have to dig when I’m on a PC. There were several posts on that subreddit on that topic around that time. I’m not sure if they are still there.
Ok, I think I found it then:
How do you respond to the idea that the new path is much more difficult for neurodivergent individuals to use?
Respectfully, I personally do not agree with this criticism, even though I’ve heard it before. Anecdotal evidence is one thing, but even in this thread there are a lot of neurodivergent individuals who prefer the path.
How do you feel about the criticism of the new path in terms of overall user experience?
We read it all, and have made a number of changes based on the feedback. However, as I said above the new path is better for usage and we also believe it is on average better for learning, since the in the previous layout people spent a lot of time redoing the lessons they already knew only to extend their streak or compete in the leaderboards, while in the new path the vast majority of lessons actually teach people.
What do you think about the decline in stock value since the new path was implemented? Or is the timeframe too short for you to draw meaningful conclusions?
I like the conspiracy theory :) Given that all metrics are equal or better in the new path, I can’t imagine this is related (the stock market has been doing weird things in the last several months, especially for tech companies).
Yea, that is part of it anyway. If you notice, he hasn’t done one since lol. The app got increasingly more terrible anyway, such is enshittification.
