Greg Rosalsky
speaker
191 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 20 May
Greg Rosalsky’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
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Planet Money · If AI is so good, why are there still so many jobs for translators? · 30 Dec 2024
podcast
Recently, I've been trying to figure out how to measure if AI is overhyped right now, or maybe it's appropriately hyped. I don't know. And one of the people I talked to about this is an entrepreneur and AI innovator.
Duolingo, it's the popular language learning app. Luis has a pretty fascinating background. He was born and raised in Guatemala, and he came to the United States for college to study mathematics and computer science. In his early 20s, Luis co-created Captcha.
You're probably familiar with it, when a website forces you to prove you're human and asks you to do things like identify stoplights or bicycles or whatever in a grid of photographs. I didn't know this until I spoke to him, but CAPTCHA is actually an acronym.
Luis's work on CAPTCHA is one reason why he was awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant back in 2006. At the time, he was only 28. How do you stay humble after that?
Well, that's honest.
Back when he first co-created CAPTCHA, Luis says, the test was pretty simple. It was, you know, easier to trip up machines. At first, all it took was identifying squiggly letters and numbers.
Interestingly, Luis says, these are images that are often taken by self-driving cars. The computer guiding these cars sometimes has a hard time deciphering what these images are, which is why CAPTCHA crowdsources help from humans. This data is, in other words, kind of slowly making AI smarter.
So yeah, Luis is a pretty interesting guy to talk to about AI, not only because of his work on CAPTCHA, but also because earlier this year, there were a series of headlines suggesting that his company Duolingo laid off human workers and replaced them with AI. Okay, so here is today's bonus episode, my conversation with Luis Van An.
i want to start with jobs in language translation so i've seen a lot of these popular listicles in the media that highlight the 10 most likely jobs to be like killed by ai and basically on all of these lists are the jobs of translators interpreters and yet the u.s bureau of labor statistics projects that over the next decade the number of american translators interpreters will actually grow by four percent which is about equal to the average growth of all occupations
And I also took a look at job sites, and there are still tons of companies hiring translators, interpreters right now. So what's up here? If AI is so good, why are translating jobs actually still growing?
So does Duolingo employ translators and interpreters? And if so, how many or about how many?
What do they do at your company?
So in other words, because AI can make mistakes because you know, it's not perfect. You need humans. It's worth the extra cost.
So earlier this year, there were a number of articles, actually quite a few, including in the Washington Post. They were published and they made a really big deal out of the fact that Duolingo laid off, I guess, some contractors who specialized in translation and replaced them with AI. So first off, what can you tell us about that episode? Did you lay off translators and replace them with AI?
Showing 161–180 of 191 · page 9 of 10
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