If you believe the hype, translators will all soon be out of work. Luis von Ahn, CEO and co-founder of the language learning app Duolingo, doesn't think AI is quite there... yet. In this interview, Greg Rosalsky talks with Luis about AI and how it's reshaping translation jobs and the language learning industry. We also ask him about headlines earlier this year suggesting Duolingo laid off some of its workers and replaced them with AI.This is one of Greg's Behind The Newsletter conversations where he shares his interviews with policy makers, business leaders, and economists who appear in The Planet Money Newsletter.This episode was first released as a bonus episode for Planet Money+ listeners earlier this year. We're sharing it today for all listeners. To hear more episodes like this one and support NPR in the process, sign up for Planet Money+ at plus.npr.org. We'll have a fresh bonus episode out in two weeks!You can sign up for the The Planet Money Newsletter and check out past editions here:https://www.npr.org/planetmoneynewsletterLearn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: Why are there still jobs for translators if AI is so good?
And, you know, what I don't think is going to happen is one day suddenly, you know, translation was completely ****. And then the next day is perfect. And then all translators get fired. This is a gradual process, which started out years and years ago. And today, a lot of translation is already done by computers. I mean, that's already happening.
Now, at the same time, I think there's also more and more demand for translation. Because translation is a lot cheaper, a lot faster because computers are there, there's a lot more demand. So what you're seeing today, at least for translation in particular, is this combo, this hybrid between humans and computers.
I mean, maybe the computer takes the first pass and then a human kind of fixes it up a little bit, et cetera. And over time, it is probably the case that computers will be as good as humans at language translation, maybe even better because they're faster. We're not quite there yet. It's still the case that computers make some mistakes.
And I think companies are hiring humans or governments are hiring humans. When you want somebody to actually have a real opinion, because it may be a life or death situation, for example. I don't think you want to fully rely on a computer if you're a translator for the army or something like that. And you're talking to an enemy combatant. I don't think you want to fully do that yet.
or companies who just want to make sure that no mistakes are made. But even translators that are hired, most of them use computer translation as a first step. And I think you're going to see something like that.
So does Duolingo employ translators and interpreters? And if so, how many or about how many?
Interpreters, we don't because we don't do what you would see on the UN, doing real-time interpretation like that. But translators, we do. Not very many. We have been reducing that number for a while. And at this point, it's dozens. It's not a lot.
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Chapter 2: How has AI evolved in translation over the years?
What do they do at your company?
Generally, they're going over the things that computers have done. Because most of the stuff we do with computers, yeah, double-checking, making sure. Now, it depends on what for, by the way, I should say. There are certain, you know, there's a difference in importance in text.
For example, if it's our content, as in like our learning content, there's so much of that, thousands and thousands and thousands of kind of sentences and words and paragraphs. That is mostly done by computers, and we probably spot-check it. But if it's things like the user interface of Duolingo, where we say like, you know, the button says quick,
and we have to translate that is all done with humans. And we spend a lot of effort on that, but that's because each one of those is highly valuable. Like we cannot have a mistake in the quit button or in the button that says purchase now or whatever. We just cannot have a mistake.
And not only, it's not just about mistakes is we want to make sure that the voice is consistent throughout the app, et cetera.
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Chapter 3: What role do humans still play in translation?
So in other words, because AI can make mistakes because you know, it's not perfect. You need humans. It's worth the extra cost.
Yeah. For example, in our app, we have made the decision that in Spanish, we use the informal second person pronoun. So when we refer to somebody in the app, we refer to the user informally. When we say you, we say the informal you. It's like usted versus... Tú is informal. Usted is formal. We don't use usted. We use tú. The people that do our user interface in Spanish know that.
I know that very well. If you were to just ask a computer to do it, It may be inconsistent in different screens. It may be something. So we just want to make sure that it's all consistent, that it has the same voice. same playful voice, et cetera. And so for that, we still employ humans.
So earlier this year, there were a number of articles, actually quite a few, including in the Washington Post. They were published and they made a really big deal out of the fact that Duolingo laid off, I guess, some contractors who specialized in translation and replaced them with AI. So first off, what can you tell us about that episode? Did you lay off translators and replace them with AI?
Chapter 4: Does Duolingo still employ human translators?
Yeah, there's a lot of exaggeration that happened there. I mean, there was all these articles that said we did major layoffs. This is not true. We did not lay off.
Like 10% of your workforce or something?
Yeah, no, this is just not true. First of all, no full-time employees were affected here. We've had a contractor force of a few hundred contractors. And what happened at the end of last year is we did not renew the contract for some of them because we looked at the work that was going to be required over time. And we just didn't need as many of them.
It is true that one of the reasons we didn't need as many of them is because some of the stuff that they were doing, we could now automate. But these were, you know, you got to understand this type of worker. I mean, these were not all of them, but a lot of them were people who were working a couple of hours a week from a very remote location.
And, you know, that type of work is probably a lot more susceptible.
for being substituted with ai than somebody who is kind of in the office every day you know doing more creative stuff or anything like that this was you know a lot of that was just kind of stuff so i gotta ask do you have any plans to lay off more contractors or employees and replace them with ai and why or why not no plans no plans for that um what what is true is that we're
You know, we're going to, as a company, and I think most tech companies, we're leaning into AI quite a bit. And we're going to continue doing that. And you know what we're seeing? I'll tell you, I'll give you a really good example of what we're seeing with AI. About five years ago, somebody pitched a feature idea to me, which was basically in the app, some of the lessons.
You were basically going to see a little animated, kind of like a little two-minute cartoon where you got to listen in the language that you were learning. It was a really cool feature. And then I asked, how long is the data for this going to take to create? Because we need to make the data for basically all the episodes. They said five years. And I said, no, you're crazy.
We're not going to make that feature. I don't want to spend five years on this. This is ridiculous. About a year ago, that same person came back to me and basically said, hey, we can do that. But the data now takes like three months to make. With AI. There's some human involvement, but it takes like three months to make with AI. And then I'm like, sure, just do it.
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Chapter 5: What was the controversy around layoffs at Duolingo?
Yeah, the productivity is like 10x. And that's more the direction we're going to go. We're going to lean into AI quite a bit, but we're just going to be doing things that before were just prohibitive because they were going to require a thousand people working for years. Whereas now 20 people working for a few months can do what was required before.
So I think on our end, that's probably more what you're going to see.
When did Duolingo start using AI and how have you been using it?
Oh, since the beginning. I mean, when we launched Duolingo, we knew that we wanted to have a computer that was going to teach you. So we didn't want to have humans teach you. We wanted to have computers. So from the beginning, we were using AI. Now, of course, AI has gotten a completely different... and definition in the last couple of years because of large language models.
But AI has been around for, you know, the concept of AI has been around for whatever, 60 years, maybe longer than that.
So when did you adopt large language models?
Well, large language models, almost two years ago, a little less than two years ago, we started playing with GPT-4. We got early access to it. And so we started playing with it. We officially launched the first features related to it last year.
Is this an official partnership with OpenAI?
We have an official partnership with OpenAI.
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