CEOInterviews.AIDuolingo CEO Reveals The Future of Jobs & AI in 2026

I

Interviewer0:00

Hi.

L

Luis Von Ahn0:00

Hi.

I

Interviewer0:01

Your employees are getting a little creative.

L

Luis Von Ahn0:05

We pay that guy and he has his own personality. He just does what he wants.

I

Interviewer0:10

AI is not going to take your job. Somebody using AI is going to take your job.

N

Narrator0:13

This is Luis Von Ahn, CEO of Duolingo. Recently, two of his employees built a chess course with AI in 6 months. No engineering background, no knowledge of the subject. It became the fastest growing course in the company. There are a lot of rumors of large companies firing people. They say it's AI.

L

Luis Von Ahn0:30

We have never done a layoff despite what the internet may think. It is important to continue hiring people because a single employee is just way more productive now than they used to be.

I

Interviewer0:39

I'm going to name five professions and you're going to make some predictions. Gone in 5 years are not going anywhere.

L

Luis Von Ahn0:47

There will be fewer and fewer.

I

Interviewer0:50

Luis, you told your team that nobody gets hired unless the team proves AI can do the work first. Can you tell me how you actually track that? As a founder,

L

Luis Von Ahn1:03

Our goal here is to use AI to benefit our users. Internally, we have this golden rule. We're only going to use AI to benefit our learners. Some people may imagine that some companies may be firing people and having AI do their job. That's not what we're doing whatsoever. Our team has gotten significantly better at using AI over the last couple of years. And that has allowed us to do a lot more. It has allowed us to put out a lot more content, a lot more learning content, etc. We as a management team are not necessarily tracking like, 'Oh, are you doing something that AI can do or not?' We're just really trying to tell everyone to try to be as efficient as possible with AI and our employees are doing that.

I

Interviewer1:45

And can you give me some of the best examples from the team for someone who's watching this and they're like, 'Okay, my manager tells me to start using AI, but I have no idea how to do it.' Do you have like best case examples?

L

Luis Von Ahn1:55

It depends on what your job role is. I think most of our engineers have basically really changed their workflows. They're using AI coding tools. A lot of our product managers have decided to use AI to make prototypes of things. So the product manager may not be implementing the thing in the full production app, but rather than coming to us with a written document, they come with a prototype. That's way better because it allows for much better decision-making. So if somebody comes to me with a written proposal and says they're going to do a way to teach Spanish better, it's hard for me to know what that actually means. But if they just show me the prototype and I can see that it really does seem to teach Spanish better, it's much easier to give approval to that type of thing. So it depends a lot on the role.

I

Interviewer2:43

Do you give them any guidance like, okay, instead of doing this, do that next time, or how do they even find out they can do these things with AI?

L

Luis Von Ahn2:51

We try to do some things in the whole company. For example, a few months ago we had a day where everybody in the company had to vibe code something, not just engineers. Every single person, people from HR, people from the finance team, everybody had to vibe code something so everybody could see the power of it. We also have a lot of documentation about best practices. But generally, people here at Duolingo are pretty smart. They're always finding new things. And I think what happens is that rather than management telling them what to do, they tell each other what to do. We have a lot of Slack channels. One of them is called 'Best AI Practices' and so people are just sharing stuff. We also have another one that's called 'AI Fails,' which is all the things that go wrong. It's an incredible thing, very empowering for people. They're like, 'Oh my god, I made an app.' Usually they're very small apps, but it's like I made an app. One of the things that has happened inside this company is everybody has made their own dashboard for their KPIs or something.

I

Interviewer3:52

Yeah. For whatever it is they're tracking. I mean, I see a few product managers that have vibe-coded a whole thing with our users in every country and what they're doing. That's super impressive. And is that how you track AI proficiency? Because now it's part of performance reviews, right? At Duolingo,

L

Luis Von Ahn4:06

For a while it was part of performance reviews. We decided not to do that and I'll tell you why. I sent a memo to the company that said part of your performance review is going to be usage of AI. And we found that people were, I don't know if they were doing that, but they were asking, 'Do you just want us to use AI for AI's sake?' And at the end, we backtracked and said, 'No, look, the most important thing in your performance is that you are doing whatever your job is as well as possible. A lot of times AI can help you with that, but if it can't, I'm not going to force you to do that.' So I think we backtracked from that because it really felt like rather than being held accountable for the actual outcome, we were trying to push something that in some cases did not fit.

I

Interviewer4:49

And do you have a specific example where somebody did something in a week without AI and then with AI they multiplied the output?

L

Luis Von Ahn4:57

We now teach chess on Duolingo. For a long time we only taught languages, now we teach a few other things. Chess is the latest course we added. This course got started by two people, neither of whom knew chess, neither of whom knew how to program. They basically vibe-coded the first prototype of it. The final version that is actually in the app, of course, we put some engineers in there, but they really got very far in a span of about 6 months. They created the whole curriculum for chess. They created a prototype of the app entirely with AI. And again, these people did not know any chess.

I

Interviewer5:33

And whose idea was that? Was it their idea?

L

Luis Von Ahn5:35

It was their idea to do that. They're the ones who wanted to add chess. By the way, they came to me a year earlier to say, 'We want to add chess.' I said, 'I don't want to add chess.' Because it's just a game and we're an education app. But what happened was that a few months later, I talked to the minister of education of my country, Guatemala. And she said to me, 'Our public education system in Guatemala is so broken that I'm considering sending every student a chessboard so that at least they'll learn logical thinking.' When she said that to me, I thought, 'Oh, wow. Okay, this is actually part of education.' So I told them, 'Okay, you can add the chess course.' But I said, 'I don't have any engineers to give you, so go ahead.' And they figured it out.

I

Interviewer6:20

Six months, right?

L

Luis Von Ahn6:21

About six months. Yeah.

I

Interviewer6:22

And now it's your fastest growing course.

L

Luis Von Ahn6:24

Yeah. At this point we have 7 million daily active users learning chess.

I

Interviewer6:29

This is fascinating. Can you tell me step by step what was their process? So if somebody's watching and they're like, 'Wow, if Duolingo is able to do such a spin-off, which is kind of different from languages, if I want to start something with AI and build a fast growing product, what are the five steps they need to take?'

L

Luis Von Ahn6:47

These two guys, the first thing they did was probably learn chess, because they didn't know any chess and that's one of the reasons they wanted to add it, because they themselves wanted to learn chess. But after that, they started looking at the different tools that are out there for learning chess, doing market research to figure out what's out there. They found that what was out there was not all that great. Then they decided to start vibe coding something. This person does have some technical knowledge, not an engineer, but some technical knowledge. So they downloaded Cursor and at first they made just chess puzzles. Then they realized that the AI was not very good at making chess puzzles. So they decided to train it with an online database of many different chess puzzles. They trained the AI with that and it got a lot better. After that, they started making more and more mobile prototypes for me to play with until I told them that it was good enough to put in the app.

I

Interviewer7:50

And then you put it in the app, and did you give it an external push or people just started discovering it?

L

Luis Von Ahn7:56

By putting it in the app, very quickly a lot of people came. But chess really has a big draw. We put other courses in the app that have not grown as much. For example, it turns out chess is more fun than math.

I

Interviewer8:07

So someone who just heard about your chess course that was spun out so quickly and they want to start building something with AI today, what advice would you give them?

L

Luis Von Ahn8:17

The biggest advice I can give them is to start. A lot of people talk about starting. They're like, 'Oh, I have an idea, but...' The biggest thing is just sit down and do it. You will learn a lot by just trying to do it. Other than that, try to learn how some of the best tools work. Vibe coding will help you a lot, but it's not just vibe coding. Trying to make the initial designs for it, you can have AI tools to make the initial screens and everything. So use it all and try to make the thing. I haven't quite yet seen somebody who knows nothing about programming really make a good app, but I have seen people who know a little bit about programming make apps. So I would tell you it's still worthwhile learning the structure of programs. That seems important. Even though you may not need to program word by word, just knowing how things work, for example, knowing the difference between the server and the client, these very basic things, I think that's important.

I

Interviewer9:24

Did it give you more ideas to add more courses that are non-language related?

L

Luis Von Ahn9:28

Yeah, it's given us a lot of ideas. We are not yet working on other stuff, but we have a long list of things we want to teach. K through 12 science, we want to teach how to draw. There's all kinds of things, but at the moment we're not really working on them because we want to continue working on math, music, and languages.

I

Interviewer9:46

Got it. But any employee can just go and vibe code one of these courses and show you, and maybe they will.

L

Luis Von Ahn9:52

Yeah, that's what I tell the company. A lot of times people come to me and they're like, 'What course are you going to add next?' And I tell them I wanted to add K through 12 science, and then we added math. I wanted to add K through 12 science, and then we added music. I wanted to add K through 12 science, and then we added chess. At this point I also want to add K through 12 science. But it turns out that what people do here is somebody comes up with a really good idea, and if it's good and they're passionate about it, we let them do it.

I

Interviewer10:19

Let's go back to the AI failure chat. Can you recall any examples of AI actually failing in a task?

L

Luis Von Ahn10:28

Oh yeah, there are a lot of things where it's failing. I'll tell you the biggest one, which I think we're starting to see a difference now, but it wasn't the case a year ago. If you look at Twitter and read what people are saying, two years ago they said I should have fired all our engineers because AI is better at coding than engineers. This has been said for the last two years. But it was interesting because I would come here and I would not really see a speed up on engineering. There's a disconnect. People say AI is better at coding than humans, but the reality is it's not yet the case that AI is better at coding than humans. I think you still really need engineers and you're going to need them for a long time. We've seen a lot of cases where you tell the AI to program something and sometimes it works, but when it doesn't work, there's a real problem because you don't really know what it did, and it's really hard to debug it. You get the happy path really fast, but the unhappy path takes so long that you end up spending more effort on that than the time you saved on the other things. We've seen that quite a bit. We've also seen AI not be able to generate things like narrative stories. Sometimes it does a good job, sometimes it doesn't, and it just comes up with things that don't make sense. When you see a demo and you ask it to come up with a story, those demos always look amazing. But when you try to come up with a hundred stories, you realize only 30 are good and the other 70 are not.

I

Interviewer12:03

So human still needs to check and select.

L

Luis Von Ahn12:05

Oh, check, yeah. All our content needs to be there. There are a lot of steps to try to either check it or spot-check it to make sure the quality is high.

I

Interviewer12:16

So if we compare today and a year ago, how much more productive is the company with AI?

L

Luis Von Ahn12:21

I don't know. It's more in pockets. I don't know of any larger company that has seen a 10x speed up. Startups really see it because when you're a one-person team, one person can do a lot of stuff. With a larger company, it's harder. Most engineers don't spend 8 hours a day coding. They have to go to meetings. There's a part of it that you just cannot speed up. Then there's the part they spend coding. Maybe you can speed that up, but at the moment you cannot speed it up by 1000x. You can just a little faster. So overall, we're not putting out 10 times as many features. We're seeing some speed ups here and there in different pockets of the company. One-person companies are a lot faster, but that's because you don't have to interface with all the other parts of the company. Also, AI is not as good with existing code bases as it is with a brand new codebase.

I

Interviewer13:14

We've been talking a lot about how AI is changing the way people learn and retain information. And that got me thinking about something I changed in how I organize my own daily life and work... What about you as a founder? Does AI help you make decisions or any workflows that worked for you?

L

Luis Von Ahn15:10

Research. It used to be the case that whenever I had something that needed to be researched, like I don't know, what is the chess landscape in India? I would need to either spend a lot of time myself or get a team of people to help me. Whereas now I can get a pretty good idea by just asking Gemini or something like that. So research I do a lot more by myself. That has helped me. But ultimately the decisions are made by me. It's not like I asked the computer, 'What would you decide?' I haven't done that.

I

Interviewer15:42

So don't use it as a coach, or you haven't vibe-coded your own KPIs or whatever?

L

Luis Von Ahn15:46

I've done a bunch of vibe coding for things. Certainly my KPIs, but decisions I still make myself.

I

Interviewer15:54

Okay, I interview a lot of cool people on this podcast. In the past three weeks, I had Reed Hastings and Bill Gurley who are legendary investors. And I asked them a question: 'What is the first market that's going to be completely changed by AI, the market you should be looking at?' And they told me language. Like, thank you so much, it's been my thing for 10 years. What do you think?

L

Luis Von Ahn16:14

I don't know what that means. Change?

I

Interviewer16:17

Like you don't have to learn a language because everything is translated.

L

Luis Von Ahn16:20

I don't buy that. If you look at our users, we have more than 100 million active users. Half of them are learning as a hobby. Whether AI can do it or not, it's a hobby. Chess is a great example. Computers have been better at chess than humans since 1997. A lot more people are learning chess today than they were in 1997. It's a hobby. For half of our learners, it's a hobby. And I don't think whether computers can do it or not will matter. The other half are learning English. Anybody who tells you that people don't want to learn a language has not had to learn English.

I

Interviewer17:00

It's interesting how you say 50% are learning other languages. Hobby. English, necessity.

L

Luis Von Ahn17:05

Yes. But that's how it is in the world. If you're learning French, it's generally a hobby. It's not always true, but the majority of people learning French want to feel cool when they go to Paris so they can order a croissant. Somebody who has never had to learn English says languages are unnecessary. But somebody who has had to learn English knows it's a different thing. You just need to learn English. Nobody is going to allow you to go to a university with a phone that translates everything the professor says. So I'm not particularly worried about that.

I

Interviewer17:56

Is there a fraction of the market? I'm thinking about translators, for example. Somebody spends four years learning that. What would you say to those people?

L

Luis Von Ahn18:03

It depends on what it is. There are fractions of the market that are probably going to change quite a bit. In terms of demand, some people may have wanted to learn a little bit of a language if they were going to visit Germany for two days, maybe now they won't because they can just use translation. But that's a very small minority of our users. The majority are hobby or English. The other thing about language translation is that simultaneous translation has been really good for a while. This is not an LLM thing; Google Translate was really good 10 years ago. We've seen the demand to learn a language actually go up, not down. So this is not something we internally are worried about, but I understand people say it.

I

Interviewer18:54

Yeah. I'm also thinking like if you have smart glasses that translate everything for you automatically. I don't think people really use the AirPods to translate.

L

Luis Von Ahn19:05

No. I'm thinking maybe it's glasses that translate signs.

I

Interviewer19:08

Because when we came to Silicon Valley in 2015, we were pitching our company that does language travel, language courses. I think 50% of American investors said it's not a market, it's going to go down.

L

Luis Von Ahn19:21

We've had this problem for the entirety of the company. Duolingo is based in the United States. When we first pitched to investors here, the most common thing was, 'Nobody really wants to learn a language. Math, though, people want to learn math.' I'm sure investors think that because they're good at math, but the reality is there are more people learning languages in the world than there are people learning math.

I

Interviewer19:47

What was your mindset when the smartest people in the world tell you that? Like, 'I don't care, I just...'

L

Luis Von Ahn19:51

I grew up in Guatemala. I could see what it was to have to learn English. It is a huge thing to learn English. It changes people's lives.

I

Interviewer20:04

Yeah.

L

Luis Von Ahn20:04

Do you have another worry? So you have an app, but now we're in the era when anyone can vibe code an app for themselves. What if I go to Claude and ask, 'Can you gamify my experience? Create me an app that's personalized to me, my interests, my hobbies.' Do you worry about that?

I

Interviewer20:22

A little bit, but not really. This is funny. Inside the company we never talk about this. We see Twitter talking about it or investors, but we internally don't talk about that. Ultimately, I think you can ask AI to make you an app, but making a really good app is not that easy. We have data from hundreds of millions of people about how they learn a language. Every single day more than a billion exercises are answered on Duolingo, and we use that data to teach you better. We just have a lot of data on how to keep you motivated. There are probably 2-3,000 language learning apps in the world. With vibe coding there will be 20,000. But at the moment we're not particularly concerned. Something may happen.

Is there anything concerned? Because I'm asking because I talked to people and they say, 'This is going to be eliminated. We're done.' And you're like, 'It's fine.'

L

Luis Von Ahn21:21

No, I wouldn't say that all is fine. I do think a lot of things are going to change.

I

Interviewer21:25

What do you think is going to change? What are you preparing for?

L

Luis Von Ahn21:28

I think that user expectations are going to change, and we have to stay ahead of it. A good example is one of the things we have in the app is conversation practice with AI. When we first put that out, the cost was high for us. So we put it behind the most expensive tier. At the moment the cost has come down enough that we're going to start giving it to much cheaper tiers.

We're probably going to eventually give it away for free.

I

Interviewer22:06

Mhm.

L

Luis Von Ahn22:07

We're doing that because I believe that customers are going to start expecting that. Like I think there will be apps that start doing this for free and if we don't do it now, we'll be forced to do it in a few years. So that's the type of stuff we're doing to prepare for this, because I think we just need to stay ahead.

I

Interviewer22:23

Yeah. So users will expect more from

L

Luis Von Ahn22:25

I think users will expect more. I think users will expect the apps to be a lot more intelligent, which they should.

I

Interviewer22:31

Yeah.

L

Luis Von Ahn22:31

We're undergoing kind of a platform shift here, and what ends up happening in platform shifts is that the companies who were the winner before the platform shift may or may not remain the winner after that. So I hope that we can do that. Also talking about AI and workforce. I just talked to Gary Vaynerchuk and I really like what he said. Like there are a lot of rumors of people and news people firing like the large companies firing people and they say it's AI. Then Gary said something that struck me, because he said like if I fire 100 people, my competitor hires them and they still 10x their output, like I'm dumb for firing them. How do you think about that?

We have never laid anybody off here. We have never done a layoff despite what the internet may think. The internet may think that they misunderstood. We've never done a layoff here. I think that it is important to continue hiring people because now the way I see it is a single employee is just way more productive now than they used to be. So I get a better return on investment by having another employee. So that's how I see it. I mean, my sense, of course I cannot speak about the very specific companies, but my sense is that at least in some of the cases, AI is just an easy PR reason.

I

Interviewer23:44

Yeah.

L

Luis Von Ahn23:46

Yeah. I mean, usually what happens is you overhired, and when you overhired, you're like okay, because of AI we're going to do that. I don't at least... at Dualingo, the way we run the company... I am surprised that there are companies doing that, because I see no reason.

I

Interviewer24:03

Yeah. I talked... I was just at Davos and I was talking to somebody who releases their jobs report. All the layoffs are structural, like overhire during CO. So it's not really... a lot of companies overhired during CO and I understand that, and then if you overhire, you probably don't need these people, but blaming AI is an easy scapegoat. It is what he just said actually worries me the most. Everyone's talking about AI replacing jobs and big companies firing people. This is not what's happening here, right? He's actually hiring people, but he's hiring those who know AI. Same for me where we're just hiring a social media manager. And the questions I was asking them during the interview, how you going to automate this? How are you going to use AI in this process? Founders are looking for people who utilize AI in their work. And this is actually what my newsletter is about. It's called Future Proof. And every week I share what we learned with AI. Like my PR person just ripped the whole website with all the transcripts from this podcast. And we share things like that in the newsletter. So, first of all, subscribe to this channel and second, subscribe to the newsletter. Can we talk about the stock price? Because when I was preparing for this, I saw the 82% collapse of the stock. But what I really want to talk about because you explained that to your shareholders. Can you walk me through your mindset as a founder when you make such decisions that make your users happy but they don't make your investors happy?

L

Luis Von Ahn25:29

Well, the decision was made by AI. So, I'm... that is a joke. That is not what happened. I made that decision. My look... conscious shift in how we run the company. I made a conscious shift and certainly the executive team was behind me. But we got to a point where, you know, if you look at over the last 5 years, we've grown a lot. We became a public company in 2021. We have grown our user base by more than our active users by more than 5x since then. So we've grown a lot. We've also grown our revenue by a similar amount. We've grown a lot. But two things happened. One is that throughout 2025, we've been still growing, but we were growing slower than we were growing in previous years. So that's one thing that happened, like our user base was growing slower than in previous years. The second thing that happened is because of AI, I really do believe that education is going to change quite a bit and we are a really important player in the education category and I want to be in a situation where we're going to lead some of that change through AI. So the combination of I want to lead through that change in AI and our user growth slowing down told me we need to do something important, change how we operate so that we continue grabbing as many users as possible. Now that comes with a cost, which is we are not going to be monetizing our user base as much as we were before.

I

Interviewer26:58

And investors don't love that.

L

Luis Von Ahn27:00

But we knew, you know, when we made this decision we talked to, of course, all internally our finance team, everybody agreed this is going to decrease our stock price.

I

Interviewer27:09

Did you expect that number like 80%?

L

Luis Von Ahn27:11

I didn't know exactly what to expect honestly, but I knew that it was going to be a lot. So we knew that, but we made the decision consciously because we think that if we continued operating the way we were operating, we probably could have continued growing a little bit, etc., but at some point it was going to be capped. Whereas I think if we really try to get a much larger user base, we're going to be a much larger company in the long term. And the thing is, I'm operating this company. I mean, I'm hoping that this is my last job and this is the last thing that I do. And I have many more years of energy left.

I

Interviewer27:43

And you never regretted the decision.

L

Luis Von Ahn27:44

Oh, no. No. That is amazing because as a founder, like again, hearing from the market what they think about your decision is tough. They don't like it.

I

Interviewer27:53

It's tough. Wow.

L

Luis Von Ahn27:55

I know. I agree. I agree. Look, it's not that it hasn't been tough. I mean, I don't regret the decision because I believe that it is the right decision, but it's been tough. I still am very convinced this is the right decision.

I

Interviewer28:07

Do you feel like because you're founder of a publicly traded company, does your mood depend on your stock price?

L

Luis Von Ahn28:14

It used to when we first went public. I learned to stop looking at least every day. I mean, it's not that I don't know the ballpark, but I don't look every day. The first year or so, it'd be like it went up by a dollar, it went down by a dollar. Now, like you're used to it.

I

Interviewer28:33

Because as a creator, my self-worth depends on how my last video is performing, which is not right, which is not good for my mental health. I'm learning how to not look at it.

L

Luis Von Ahn28:45

Well, I will tell you this. The same is true for me, but not with our stock price, it's with daily active users.

I

Interviewer28:52

So you still have the same...

L

Luis Von Ahn28:53

I just moved it to daily active users. So every morning, yes, it's growing and everything, but every morning our daily active user report for the previous day comes at 5:00 a.m. Exactly. I wake up very early. Every morning at 5:01 a.m., my mood gets set.

I

Interviewer29:09

It's not good.

L

Luis Von Ahn29:12

Do you think you should adjust it personally? Yeah, it's not good mentally, but hey, I prefer this than the stock price, though. This makes more sense. At least...

I

Interviewer29:18

This is something you can control.

L

Luis Von Ahn29:19

This is something I can control and it's an actual measure of the health of this company. The stock price, some of it is, over the long term it is a good measure of the health of this company, but on a day-to-day basis, there used to be days that the stock price went down because oil prices changed and I'm like okay, how is that related to me?

I

Interviewer29:40

Any other mental hacks? Because I'm talking to you, you're not really worried about AI, you learned how to make the stock price not control your mood. Do you have any mental life hacks that you developed as a founder during these times? What helps you? What do you do when something goes bad? Do you go on walks to create ideas?

L

Luis Von Ahn30:00

Don't get me wrong, when something goes bad, it gets to me. I definitely gets to me. I try to really think about the long term. One of the things that has helped me the most is really thinking about this. This is not just about the company. This is, in general, and of course I didn't invent this, this is a lot of people say this. Thinking about anything: will this matter in six months? The vast majority of things will not matter in six months. The vast majority of things. So sometimes I get really upset and I think about it. Will this matter in six months? Some things will, but the vast majority will not matter in six months. And that makes me feel a lot better because I think okay, I'm upset for no reason because this is going to fizzle out.

I

Interviewer30:40

What about other things like marketing or content? Do you think it matters for a founder?

L

Luis Von Ahn30:47

Depending on what type of company you're doing. Certainly if you're doing a consumer company, marketing is going to end up mattering.

I

Interviewer30:53

One of the most important things.

L

Luis Von Ahn30:55

It's going to end up mattering a lot. I mean, I love our marketing team. They are excellent. They've done some really creative things over the years and have helped us grow a lot. I don't know of any hacks. I mean, ultimately, you need to figure out how to get the word out for your product. I will say I have seen many people try to cover a bad product with good marketing and that can only get you so far. The reality is if you want to really succeed, your product has to be good.

I

Interviewer31:20

Yeah.

L

Luis Von Ahn31:21

I think good product, bad marketing is not very good, but bad product, good marketing is worse.

I

Interviewer31:28

Do you have time set for yourself every week when you play with the new AI tools or you just discover on the go?

L

Luis Von Ahn31:33

No, I don't know if I have time that I've set for myself like that, but basically what happens is I talk to some of the employees. I know who in the company is at the forefront and I talk to them and then they tell me, 'Oh, you should try that, you should try that.' And then I try it.

I

Interviewer31:48

And for someone who's employed at a company and they want to hear advice from a founder whose company is using AI, what would you say to them? How do they start implementing AI in their job?

L

Luis Von Ahn31:58

Again, it depends a lot on their job. A lot of different tools for a lot of different things. It's not that hard to find the right tool for your job and then try to use it and see if you can automate parts of your job with it. A lot of our employees have automated parts of their job. Not the whole thing, but parts of their job.

I

Interviewer32:12

I like that they're doing this by themselves. That actually says a lot about the way you hire.

L

Luis Von Ahn32:16

Yeah, people are doing this by themselves.

I

Interviewer32:18

And when you're doing interviews now, are you asking about...?

L

Luis Von Ahn32:20

We do ask. What we want people here is to be open to it. I mean, we really are, you know, you do see the people who are just a lot more open to using AI versus the people who are like, nah. We want people who are more open. I mean, there's a good thing that somebody said that I pretty much believe. AI is not going to take your job. Somebody using AI is going to take your job. And I believe that is mostly true.

I

Interviewer32:43

It's 10x more productive with tools. Do you believe that in 10 years we'll have millions of AI agents in our companies?

L

Luis Von Ahn32:53

Probably. I mean, what I've learned in the last, especially the last few years, is that predicting the future has gotten much harder because of AI. If you talked to me 10 years ago, I could have told you what the next year or the next three years were going to look like. It's probably we're going to have a new version of the iPhone, it's going to have a better screen. It was just not that hard to predict. Yeah, it was kind of boring. Whereas now, I'm very bad at predicting what's going to happen.

I

Interviewer33:21

But you're not nervous.

L

Luis Von Ahn33:24

I am nervous. Not for the immediate term and not necessarily for this company, but I am nervous about... I do believe that some shift is going to happen and I'm nervous in that I just don't know what that's going to be. If you listen to different founders, everybody's telling you things that are pretty self-serving. Like, if you work in a company that makes AI for lawyers, they'll tell you lawyers are going to disappear. Everybody's saying all these self-serving things. I don't know what they are, but I do think something's going to change, and I'm nervous because I don't know what that is.

I

Interviewer33:53

Nobody knows. Go with the flow.

L

Luis Von Ahn33:56

Nobody does. And I think the best thing you can do is try to adapt as fast as possible. And by the way, I am glad that I'm not having to choose a college career right now because I have no idea what I would choose.

I

Interviewer34:08

Yeah, it's even tougher now.

L

Luis Von Ahn34:10

Yeah, I have no idea what I would choose.

I

Interviewer34:12

I have a blitz for you. So, I'm going to name five professions and you're going to make some predictions. What do you think?

L

Luis Von Ahn34:18

Oh, man. Predict. I'm very bad at that.

I

Interviewer34:20

Well, like what your gut tells you. Gone in 5 years, gone in 10 years, or not going anywhere. Let's try social media manager.

L

Luis Von Ahn34:26

You mean for like a company?

I

Interviewer34:29

Yeah. Like coming up with scripts and...

L

Luis Von Ahn34:33

I don't think that's going anywhere.

I

Interviewer34:35

That's what I think. I don't... translator.

L

Luis Von Ahn34:38

I think there will be... gone is a hard term, because I think there will still be cases where we're going to want real human translation, but there will be fewer and fewer. But I do think that for certain situations, we're going to want that premium. It's going to turn into very premium. But for most everyday uses, yeah, it's going to go away.

I

Interviewer35:02

Okay. Teacher.

L

Luis Von Ahn35:04

Oh, not going away. I mean, teachers serve a lot of things and I cannot imagine they're going to go away. So, I have a lot of thoughts about this. I mean, I'm a former teacher. I used to be a professor. I think AI is going to be great at teaching certain parts, certainly giving you a lot of repetition, maybe even adapting to what you learn, but ultimately teachers are great at putting things into context. They're also really great at making people want to do something. They're very inspiring. When I was growing up, I wanted to be like my teachers. And it's kind of hard to want to be like an AI. I don't want to be like an AI, but a teacher. They're very inspiring. They put things into context. At the moment, I'm pretty certain that if you have a really great teacher, that is better than not having a teacher. Again, not all teachers are equally good, etc. But by the way, today computers are not as good at teaching as a really great teacher. That has not yet happened. I think it may start getting to the point where in certain aspects they're about as good, but I think having a teacher will always be better than not.

I

Interviewer36:15

I agree.

L

Luis Von Ahn36:16

That's what I think. So, I don't believe that it's going anywhere. We're going to learn with AI, do some stuff, but we still need someone human to reply to.

I

Interviewer36:24

This is what I think. It's also incredibly hard to keep people motivated. And teachers have ways to get people motivated to do certain things. And they start noticing things like, 'Oh, that student feels left out. I'm going to do something about it.' This is pretty hard to do with AI. So, I just can't imagine this is going to go away, but I could be wrong. Strategist. I don't know if you tried AI for strategy, but for me...

L

Luis Von Ahn36:50

It's good.

I

Interviewer36:51

So good. Sometimes it notices things I wouldn't even think about. Like it said you were not working on your podcast. I'm like oh shoot yes I am not. And I'm not appearing in any searches. I recently asked the Slack bot, it sees all my conversations, and I asked it to give me my areas for improvement, and it was excellent.

L

Luis Von Ahn37:14

That's a very good prompt.

I

Interviewer37:15

It told me exactly what my 360 told me but in a much more concise way. Strategy, I don't know. I don't know the answer to that question. I would say there's probably still some... the thing about AI is that it's really good at known things. I still think that there's going to be some amount of human ingenuity necessary for certain types of strategy. So again, it may be that it just becomes a very premium thing.

Okay. Project manager.

L

Luis Von Ahn37:47

Oh no, I don't think that's going to go away. In my experience, project managers, if you need multiple people working on something, really good project managers have really good EQ and end up figuring out why a project is not working. And a lot of times the project is not working because that person doesn't get along with that person. Stuff like that. I think that's going to be hard. Again, there's parts of the process that can be automated, but in general, I can't imagine that AI is going to be really good at sitting two people down and being like, 'You two are not getting along. You need to start getting along.' That seems hard.

I

Interviewer38:27

So, as someone who's running a company, do you think there are any positions that are going away in the nearest future or they just going to be transformed?

L

Luis Von Ahn38:34

I think most of it is going to be transformed. And I think what will happen is that some companies, particular companies that are not growing a lot, are going to find that they can do the same with fewer people. So it may not be very specific professions, but it will be like do we need 100 people doing customer service or can we do so with only 10. I think that will happen. The entire profession going away is kind of hard. I mean, even customer service, a lot of people say customer service is going to go away. You probably still need a couple of humans to orchestrate it. So, I do think that you'll find some companies that will need fewer people over time.

I

Interviewer39:16

Yeah, I totally feel that. We wanted to hire someone who would do my scripting for Instagram, but then I tried Claude and I created a project and it was so good. I'm like okay, I don't need to hire anyone. My social media manager can just do that now. So, it's basically doing more with less people. Would you want to start again in 2026 if you could, like if you could go back to how old you were when you started?

L

Luis Von Ahn39:42

I probably would start again. But if you ask me to choose between whether I want to start today or 15 years ago, I'm very happy we started 15 years ago. Because we now got to this point where with Duolingo, we have a lot of money because we're profitable. We have more than a billion dollars in the bank. We have a large user base. We have a large install base. So I feel pretty good about the situation that we're in. Whereas if we were to start today, boy, I don't know. It's pretty hard to start today. I would do it, but...

I

Interviewer40:18

What would you start? Same thing?

L

Luis Von Ahn40:20

If Duolingo didn't exist, yeah. I mean, given that Duolingo exists, I don't know if I would start that.

I

Interviewer40:25

Would it be languages or something else? Like teaching people AI or chess?

L

Luis Von Ahn40:28

No, I would start with languages. Interestingly, I am personally not a major language learning nerd. I'm not. Neither is my co-founder Sean. What is interesting is that in retrospect, I'm very happy we started with languages. I don't know of another subject, even though we've done a lot of research, I don't know of another subject that gets learned as much. If you look, there's about two billion people in the world learning languages. That's the number.

I

Interviewer40:54

Any other subject is less. I mean math...

L

Luis Von Ahn40:56

Math is a billion.

I

Interviewer40:58

One billion people.

L

Luis Von Ahn40:59

Math is basically the number of people learning math in the world is highly correlated, almost identical, as the number of people in the world that are in K-12 education. There's about a billion. Nobody else is learning.

I

Interviewer41:11

So nobody's learning math for pleasure as a hobby.

L

Luis Von Ahn41:13

I mean, I'm sure there are, but it's a tiny fraction of the population. So math has about a billion. Anything like chess is 100 million something. Any subject K-12 science is a few hundred million. Programming is like 20 million.

I

Interviewer41:29

And when it comes to spending money?

L

Luis Von Ahn41:32

Language is 60 billion. It depends on who's spending the money.

I

Interviewer41:36

Yeah.

L

Luis Von Ahn41:36

Governments are spending a ton teaching math, but it's governments, and that money is hard to get to because governments are... but there's probably more spend on math, but it's because it's the governments.

I

Interviewer41:49

And what about consumers?

L

Luis Von Ahn41:51

I think language. By the way, of those two billion people that are learning language, about 1.8 billion are learning English.

I

Interviewer41:56

Yeah. So English is just really big.

L

Luis Von Ahn41:59

It's crazy. I didn't realize that because I thought it would be like math or now AI, maybe software engineering.

I

Interviewer42:05

You and I live in a bubble.

L

Luis Von Ahn42:07

We do live in a bubble.

I

Interviewer42:09

Because we got out of other cultures into this bubble and now we forget. I mean, for programming right now with AI coding, who knows what's going to happen. But a few years ago, whenever we would meet investors, they would be like, the thing everybody wants to learn is coding.

L

Luis Von Ahn42:23

Yeah.

I

Interviewer42:23

There's about 20 million people in the world that were learning coding. That's it.

L

Luis Von Ahn42:27

Maybe they're willing to pay more. If you want to take a programming course, you probably pay like $1,000 or $2,000 because you know you're going to get a job.

I

Interviewer42:34

Yes. With language, it's a long journey.

L

Luis Von Ahn42:36

Yes. 100%. Now, if we were an app, this is one of the reasons we never did programming. We as an app cannot charge $10,000. It's an app. We charge $6 a month. That is how much we charge. Maybe we could charge $20 a month. We can't charge $10,000. So this is why we go for things that have hundreds of millions of people learning them, because we need to be a larger business. And so these things that require people paying like a service business.

I

Interviewer43:03

Yeah.

L

Luis Von Ahn43:04

Yeah.

I

Interviewer43:05

Wow. That's fascinating. Thank you so much. Thank you for being positive in 2026. That's really rare.

L

Luis Von Ahn43:12

Okay. Well, positive. Yeah. Thank you so much.

I

Interviewer43:14

Yeah. Thank you. I'm nervous, but it's no use thinking like the world's going to end. Going outside Silicon Valley, you see how... I was expecting you to say, 'Oh, I use OpenAI to automate all the reports. I'm not writing my emails.' You're not saying that. Same with Gary Vaynerchuk. I was expecting him to do like, 'Oh, this is full automation.' But he said, 'I just hired two copywriters.' I'm like, okay, New York is very different from Silicon Valley and it's very refreshing. And for everyone who's watching, it's a great idea to start a business like helping people learn AI outside.

L

Luis Von Ahn43:47

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I

Interviewer43:48

Yeah. Thank you so much.

N

Narrator43:51

I mentioned Gary Vee several times throughout this episode. I actually filmed a podcast with him on the same trip when I filmed Luis. He's thinking positively about everything that's happening right now. So if you're someone who wants to start a business now, but you're afraid that a bigger company is going to take over, watch that episode. It's going to give you a lot of enthusiasm about starting in 2026.

Duolingo CEO Reveals The Future of Jobs & AI in 2026

About Luis Von ahn arellano