On April 28, Duolingo cofounder and CEO Luis von Ahn posted an email on LinkedIn that he had just sent to all employees at his company. In it, he outlined his vision for the language-learning app to become an “AI-first” organization, including phasing out contractors if AI could do their work, and giving a team the ability to hire a new person only if they were not able to automate their work through AI.
The response was swift and scathing. “This is a disaster. I will cancel my subscription,” wrote one commenter. “AI first means people last,” wrote another. And a third summed up the general feeling of critics when they wrote: “I can’t support a company that replaces humans with AI.”
A week later, von Ahn walked back his initial statements, clarifying that he does not “see AI replacing what our employees do” but instead views it as a “tool to accelerate what we do, at the same or better level of quality.”
In a new interview, von Ahn says that he was shocked by the backlash he received. “I did not expect the amount of blowback,” he recently told the Financial Times. While he says he should have been more clear about his AI goals, he also feels that the negativity stems from a general fear that AI will replace workers. “Every tech company is doing similar things, [but] we were open about it,” he said.
Von Ahn, however, isn’t alone. Other CEOs have also been forthright about how their AI aspirations will affect their human workforce. The CEO of Klarna, for example, said in August of last year that the company had cut hundreds of jobs thanks to AI. Last month, he added that the new tech had helped the company shrink its workforce by 40%.
Anxiety for workers around the potential that they will be replaced by AI, however, is high. Around 40% of workers familiar with ChatGPT in 2023 were worried that the technology would replace them, according to a Harris poll done on behalf of Fortune. And a Pew study from earlier this year found that around 32% of workers fear AI will lead to fewer opportunities for them. Another 52% were worried about how AI could potentially impact the workplace in the future.
The leaders of AI companies themselves aren’t necessarily offering words of comfort to these worried workers. The Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei, told Axios last month that AI could eliminate approximately half of all entry-level jobs within the next five years. He argued that there’s no turning back now.
“It sounds crazy, and people just don’t believe it,” he said. “We, as the producers of this technology, have a duty and an obligation to be honest about what is coming.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com