🤖 Duolingo Sparks Outrage With “AI-First” Shift

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In today’s Daily Report:

• 💥Duolingo Sparks Outrage With “AI-First” Shift

• 🦾What Happens When Robots Truly Understand the World?

• 🛠Trending Tools

• 🥪Brief Bites

• 💰Funding Frontlines

• 💼Who’s Hiring?

Read Time: 3 minutes

🗞RECENT NEWS

DUOLINGO

💥Duolingo Sparks Outrage With “AI-First” Shift

Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn emailed employees explaining that the company plans to take an “AI-first” approach and “rethink much of how we work.”

Key Details:

• Duolingo offers free, fun, and effective ways to learn new languages. “To teach well, we need to create a massive amount of content, and doing that manually doesn’t scale,” said von Ahn.

• “In many cases, we’ll need to start from scratch. We’re not going to rebuild everything overnight,” he added. “Like getting AI to understand our codebase will take time.”

• “AI use will be part of what we look for in hiring,” said von Ahn. “AI use will be part of what we evaluate in performance reviews.” He even outlined that employees must prove their workflows can’t be streamlined with AI before asking for more headcount.

Why It’s Important:

• The World Economic Forum (WEF) published a 2025 Future of Jobs Report, detailing how AI will dramatically reshape the global job market. They found that 41% of companies plan to reduce their headcount as AI automates certain job roles.

• Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach recently informed employees that he “made the difficult, but necessary, decision to eliminate approximately 1,750 positions” to prioritize hiring AI Talent and investing in Agentic AI.

🩺 PULSE CHECK

AI AND ROBOTICS

🦾What Happens When Robots Truly Understand the World?

Physical Intelligence (π) recently developed “pi oh five (π0.5),” which allows robots to execute actions across different real-world environments.

Key Details:

• The biggest challenge in robotics is generalization: the ability of robots to execute actions in new real-world environments with new objects.

• Imagine a robot that’s designed to clean homes. Every home is different, with unique layouts and various items. That robot must be able to pick up a fork, spoon, or plate, even if it hasn’t seen that specific utensil before.

• π0.5 is a Vision-Language-Action Model (VLA) that helps robots understand the real world through text and images to execute actions.

• VLAs consist of four elements:

  1. Text Encoder: Converts text into numerical representations.

  2. Image Encoder: Converts images into numerical representations.

  3. Information Fuser: Creates unified numerical representations that contain text and images.

  4. Actions Decoder: Converts the unified numerical representations into actions through motor commands.

• Imagine telling a robot: “Grab the red sponge!” π0.5 converts this natural language command into a Text Encoder that enables the robot to understand the meaning of “grab,” “red,” and “sponge!”

Why It’s Important:

• It’s not enough for a robot that’s designed to clean homes to be able to pick up a specific fork, spoon, or plate in a specific kitchen.

• It needs the ability to understand the general concept of a “fork,” “spoon,” or “plate” so it can handle different utensils in countless different kitchens.

🛠TRENDING TOOLS

🗣️rask.ai translates videos in multiple languages.

⛺️BASE44 builds fully functioning apps in minutes.

🥦SpinachAI turns your meetings into actionable notes.

💬beepbooply transforms text into natural-sounding speech.

📱Aha is the world’s first AI Agent Team for influencer marketing.

🧰 Browse our Always Up-To-Date AI Toolkit.

🥪BRIEF BITES

Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott explained that he expects 95% of all code to be AI-generated by 2030.

At LlamaCon 2025, Meta announced that the company’s open-source AI models have been downloaded over 1.2 billion times.

Microsoft’s controversial AI-powered “Recall” feature is copying and storing all your WhatsApp messages even if you don’t have the feature yourself.

Employees at Meta have raised alarms internally that Instagram’s AI-powered digital companions were allowed to engage in sexually explicit role-play scenarios with minors.

💰FUNDING FRONTLINES

• Supabase secures a $200M Series D to offer an open-source version of Google’s Firebase.

• Arcana Labs lands a $5.5M Seed Round for AI-Based Content Production Software.

• Basil Systems raises an $11.5M Series A to build an AI-Powered Intelligence Platform for Life Sciences.

💼WHO’S HIRING?

• Warp (New York, NY): Software Engineering Intern, Summer 2025

• Meta (Menlo Park, CA): Content Designer, Entry-Level

• Harvey (San Francisco, CA): Applied AI Engineer, Mid-Level

• Intercom (San Francisco, CA): Senior Analytics Engineer, Senior-Level

📒FINAL NOTE

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