B (3:51)

And now we have a little bit more of a clarification. What as of now, we're recording this on Monday afternoon, are the new restrictions on the H1B.

C (4:01)

So it appears that it doesn't apply to every single H1B visa holder. What the White House said on Saturday was that the changes only apply to new visas and not renewals, current visa holders, or 2025 lottery winners. So it doesn't affect the ability of existing visa holders to travel back and forth. And they also clarified that the $100,000 fee is a one time fee, not an annual fee. But we're not sure if it's totally.

B (4:32)

Resolved from what you've heard from your sources. How is the tech world anticipating this will change hiring practices and the overall makeup of their staff in the long.

C (4:41)

Run, it's raising some really big questions for companies, especially for startups and smaller companies, because they don't have the resources like say Microsoft does to pay this $100,000 for each employee. And so there are questions about how is this going to affect their hiring and will it lead to this have or have nots? Are tech companies going to just say we'll only pay for certain stars and then the rest will just figure out how to hire a US worker or outsource some other way?

B (5:13)

That was WSJ reporter Ray Smith. Coming up, we take a look at how Duolingo's promise to become an AI first company is playing out. That's after the break.

A (5:30)

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B (6:05)

Duolingo made its name as the language learning app with a chaotic green owl for a mascot, but it generated controversy earlier this year after its CEO sent staff an email calling for the company to become AI First. The WSJ Leadership Institute's Bell Lin spoke to Duolingo's Chief technology Officer, Severin Hacker, about the fallout from the memo's publication on stage at the recent WSJ Technology Council summit.

D (6:31)

The memo it was controversial because of its perceived stance on favoring AI instead of humans. And you've since faced backlash from customers who question whether there might be layoffs at Duolingo. And if a company focused on teaching people languages could function with fewer people on board. So let's start there. What happened? What do you think went wrong?

E (6:55)

Our mission is to provide the best education and make it universally available. We started with languages because it's one of the few subjects that people learn both inside and outside of schools and we didn't want to deal with schools from day one. So that's why I start with languages. That's the mission of the company now. When we saw the AI revolution with GPT4, we saw this is massive, massive opportunity for us. And let me explain why. So if you want to learn anything, whether it's jazz, golf, languages, math, music, the single best way to learn is with a one on one human tutorial. If we all had infinite resources, that's how we would learn. And that's in fact how people used to learn in the past when they had infinite resources like kings and royalty, they would hire personal one on one tutor for their kids. And the reason we don't have that is because it's so expensive. And now for the first time with AI, we believe we can achieve our mission because AI could allow us to teach as well as a one on one tutor, but at the cost of AI, which is much, much, much, much lower than a human tutor. So that's the main reason why we wrote the memo. And we see this as a massive, massive opportunity to teach better and everything else followed from that.

D (8:23)

So let's talk about AI first. Can you define what that means? Especially as a founder and as a CTO operator in practice and in reality, what does it really mean?

E (8:34)

The big question is, how can you use AI to teach better? A lot of people ask, how can we use AI to be more productive? Or everybody should use ChatGPT and AI, note takers, et cetera. I think that's all good and fine, and we obviously do that as well. At Duolingo, we use cursor and AI for development, software, engineering, et cetera. I'm very close to that. But I think you're missing the point. If you don't use AI to build new products, like, what can you build now that you previously couldn't build? So just to give you an analogy, when mobile happened at first, every, you know, every restaurant, every website built a mobile app. And that was not mobile first. Really, it was just like, oh, yeah, now we have a companion app for our service or product or whatever. But then at some point, we had Uber. And Uber was something that you couldn't have built before the smartphone. And I think that's what I'm interested in. And I think that's what your company should think about is like, what is the Uber? What is the product that you couldn't have built before AI?

D (9:34)

How are you actually putting that into practice? Are there new AI features that your users have latched onto? How are you actually building AI into Duolingo?

E (9:43)

The feature we're most proud of or most excited about is this feature called Video Call with Lily. So if you have used Duolingo in the major languages, we have this feature with the Call with Lily and you can talk to her. And the vision there is to make her the best possible conversation partner. So as part of learning a language, you have to practice conversation. And it's again, a feature that we couldn't have built before AI. We actually tried and it didn't work, but now you can actually build it, and we see tremendous uptake on that feature.

D (10:12)

How do you push the boundary in terms of you talked about back in the day, kings and queens could have their own personal tutor. Is the idea that Duolingo becomes the ChatGPT AI tutor that pushes even further into what people can learn. How do you continue to evolve how the product works?

E (10:31)

People say, okay, AI is going to replace humans, et cetera, et cetera. And that's obviously a negative. And I actually don't think that's going to happen or not nearly as fast as people think. But on the positive side, AI is also really good at teaching you things. We could get into a world where, if you guys remember Matrix, maybe I'm dating myself. But there they basically just download the Qiuchtsu or whatever into the brain. So it's like instantly 10 seconds, you know, now you know the skill, now you know languages. So I think that's probably a little bit far out in the future, but it's never been more realistic for Duolingo. Right now, really, the focus is on teaching better, teaching more. So, you know, we have been able to expand our courses by a lot. So we launched over 100 courses this year. And this is thanks to AI. Previously would have taken us tens or maybe even 100 years if not for AI.

B (11:26)

That was the WSJ Leadership Institute's Berlin speaking to Duolingo's Chief Technology Officer Severin Hacker, at the recent WSJ Technology Council Summit. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. Today's show was produced by Julie Chang with Deputy Editor Chris Sinsley and supervising producer Melanie Royce. Hi, I'm Katie Dayton for the Wall Street Journal. We'll be back later this morning with TMB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.

A (11:57)

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