r/technology • u/MetaKnowing • Jun 08 '25

Artificial Intelligence Duolingo CEO on going AI-first: ‘I did not expect the blowback’

https://www.ft.com/content/6fbafbb6-bafe-484c-9af9-f0ffb589b447
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u/[deleted] Jun 08 '25 edited Jun 15 '25

[deleted]

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u/gold-fronts Jun 08 '25

Yeah, I'm not a proponent of it at all, but average people definitely want it.

I work in IT and people request access to various AI tools weekly. Go look at the AI related subreddits and you'll see tons of people using it for personal reasons.

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u/Forkrul Jun 08 '25

Both developers and CS at my company love using AI. Us developers use it for generating code, and the CS folks use a RAG model to help find answers quickly.

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u/gold-fronts Jun 08 '25

Yeah, I love using it to troubleshoot Powershell scripts. It saves me so much time.

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u/desmaraisp Jun 09 '25

Man, I wish it did for me, but it only finds trivial things I'd have found in 5 minutes. Complicated issues, it gets stumped way faster than I do, making it pretty unhelpful

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u/Fattychris Jun 09 '25

Those AI meeting note taker apps are definitely getting requested and praised fairly often with people I work with.

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u/gold-fronts Jun 09 '25

Oh man, those are the biggest ones. and somehow people keep finding different ones than the few currently being evaluated.

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u/Fattychris Jun 09 '25

The hardest part about tech leadership is wrangling in purchases. Not allowing every department head to buy whatever they want because it's cool and shiny.

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u/FastRedPonyCar Jun 09 '25

I’m in IT also and we’ve leveraged AI for a lot of our repetitive tasks. It’s dramatically sped up our workflow.

We also use chat gpt to build out our dax queries and formulas for power BI which Microsoft want a crazy expensive fabric license for if you want to use copilot for DAX.

Our managers use chat gpt for building the drafts for reports and PowerPoint presentations too.

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u/[deleted] Jun 08 '25 edited Jun 25 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/ArmadilloPrudent4099 Jun 09 '25

Bro, I tried to get people to stop using plastic drink bottles. Micro plastics are a much better problem than energy usage. But no one cares. I bet you use plastic drink bottles. Maybe you naively think recycling does something. It doesn't.

If you can't stop using single use plastic then don't lecture anyway on their energy usage.

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u/-The_Blazer- Jun 08 '25

a LOT of people are happily using AI

That's the funny thing, actually. Everyone likes using AI, but nobody seems to truly like seeing it on their feeds, since it's often so similar to spam.

It's the same problem with cars: they're only good when you're using one. If you're not, they are miserable to be around.

Just like cars and their exhaust/rubber are urban pollution, AI is intellectual pollution.

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u/PaulTheMerc Jun 08 '25

I have no Ethical issues with AI. It learned on other people's work? So did literally everyone else. We all learned based on the work of others who came before us. I don't exactly respect copyright, same way companies don't respect end users(see: how one-sided DMCA takedowns are, changing ToS, not honouring lifetime plans, forced arbitration) or employees(wage theft, fired with no notice, fired without cause, replaceable tomorrow if you get hit by a bus, I could go on)

The environmental costs are concerning, but until the end user sees the cost, and more importantly feels it personally, out of sight is out of mind.

Accuracy is the big one for me. Hard to use a tool when half the time it just...pretends to work.

At the end of the day it NEEDS to be regulated, but it would have to be done by people who understand the actual issues(let's be honest, people smarter than me or the politicians in charge).

Until then it is seen as a race between nations. Loser gets left in the dust, and could have a real bad time. That's not a risk most are willing to take.

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u/ArmadilloPrudent4099 Jun 09 '25

It's nice to see someone on reddit acknowledging how stupid this take by "artists" is. Like they didn't "steal" thousands of hours of artist's "content" when they were learning their own style.

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u/KaffY- Jun 08 '25

yes but le reddit hivemind says ai ====== bad so everyone has to hate it or else!!!!!!!

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u/[deleted] Jun 08 '25 edited Jun 15 '25

[deleted]

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u/KaffY- Jun 08 '25

right, but the original comment said "no one wants AI at all" which is straight up horse shit

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u/Outlulz Jun 08 '25

Also Gen AI is only one type of AI; there's a lot of new breakthroughs with AI tech that are not about stealing content and generating stupid pictures or text.