Duolingo has taken a step that seems small, almost technical: it will replace part of its network of external collaborators with generative. His CEO, Luis Von Ahn, announced in an internal mail that he later published on LinkedIn. But after that phrase that sounds corporate because it is – “we will be a company AI-first” – A larger turn is hidden.
Not only in your strategy. In the type of world we started to live.
What Duolingo has done is not simply automating tasks. Is Demonstrate that, in certain industries, human talent is no longer a necessary condition to create value at scale. What was previously slow, expensive and artisanal – create formative content – can now be synthesized in mass and in seconds. Without exhaustion. Without payrolls. No creative demands. In silence.
In the last thirty years, the Internet put us in An economy where human capital – ideas, creativity, language, criteria – was the great bottleneck. People were still essential.
But we are seeing the beginning of decoupling: the separation between digital value and direct human contribution. A new starting point.
The generative AI not only replaces tasks. Is starting with redraw the merit border. Knowing how to do something well is not enough. If a machine can do it “sufficiently”, you can get out of the map. Although your version is better. Although your criteria is finer.
The qualitative differential no longer compensates for the speed and scale. And in that logic, talent ceases to be a protected asset. It becomes optional.
Duolingo will not be the only one. It has only been the first to say it without surroundings. It sounds like a sample of what is coming. Companies that no longer hire if they do not automate before, such as Shopify. Departments in which it is measured how much value you contribute with ia, not without it. And a new type of worker that must show that it is still competitive … in front of a machine.
This moment marks A rupture. Creativity, for decades, was a shelter against automation. Now is your next land. And that forces us to ask ourselves more uncomfortable questions: if talent is no longer essential, what is the place of human work in the digital economy? What remains of professional prestige when excellence no longer guarantees relevance?
The story will remember this gesture of Duolingo not because of its immediate effect, but for what it anticipates. A new phase. More than a technological change, a mutation in the rules of the game.
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