📝 26/05/25: Duolingo's AI Backtrack, Humans as "Luxury Goods" and The AI-First Conference

📌 This Week’s News Highlight: Duolingo pivots to a more human-first AI approach
A few months ago, a leaked internal memo from Duolingo caused a bit of a stir, painting a fear-mongering AI-first future that I'm sure left some employees questioning their jobs. This week, CEO Luis von Ahn clarified and somewhat softened the company’s position. It’s not about replacing teams, but rather augmenting existing employees' workflows and providing a supportive environment to experiment and learn.
💡 Thought of the Week: Where does value really lie in the age of AI?
I came across an interesting piece this week, "Humans as 'luxury goods' in the age of AI", exploring how the line between intrinsic and economic value is shifting, and where our value will increasingly lie.
In a world where knowledge isn’t as scarce and tools can generate almost anything, the value no longer sits in having the answers but in knowing what and how to explore. As the author puts it, “Constraint-driven curiosity is a mechanism to optimise attention allocation in an economy where attention is scarce.”
Curiosity, curation, taste and judgement are becoming the real edge. Whether you’re running a team or building solo, your job is to create the right constraints, ask better questions and steer exploration toward something meaningful.
“It [curiosity] amplifies upside by focusing exploration toward high-return trajectories and protects downside by minimising expensive misdirection.”
Curation now matters not just for surfacing good ideas, but for shaping them into a sound future worldview, in a way people trust.
🧠 The Battle for Agentic Browsers Has Begun
Browser wars wage on, with Opera launching Neon, the first standalone browser built around AI agents that can think, act and complete multi-step tasks. But it’s entering a race against giants. Google, Perplexity and OpenAI are all heading in the same direction, and they’re moving fast. It remains to be seen how non-AI leaders can win here.
📚 AI-First Conference for Non-Devs
I joined Allie K’s AI-First Conference this week, which was a refreshingly practical look at how non-engineers are using AI to level up workflows and build with an AI-first mindset.
A few tool standouts:
• Opus Clip - pulls viral hooks from long videos and auto-edits them into short clips
• Clay AI - surprisingly useful for mass data enrichment and outreach workflows for sales/growth teams (and way better than Google Sheets' AI capabilities)
• ARI - a smarter deep search tool that surfaces insights you’d usually miss using Deep Search or Gemini Deep Search
But what stood out the most was the mindset shift. Being "AI-first" isn’t about using tools to write emails faster (or outsourcing all of our critical thinking), it’s more about thinking in systems and applying AI tools appropriately across workflows.
Allie gave great examples, like automating those repeat creative tasks (think video thumbnails, social media clips, or pulling shareable insights from a talk like her own into a report). In other words, don’t just use AI to get things done, use it to do better, more strategic work.
📎 Watch the replay (available for a short window)
🔗 Sneaky Links
• Klarna walks back on full automation - After cutting 700 support roles, Klarna is now hiring again to complement AI, saying service quality suffered when cost-cutting prevailed. Read more
• Anthropic warns half of entry-level jobs may vanish - Their CEO says AI could eliminate 50% of entry-level roles within five years. Read more
• Perplexity Labs launched for pro users - Think of it like having an AI team on call to handle complex research or tasks across different domains. See it in action
• Ten promising AI healthtech startups in Europe - From diagnostics to mental health, here’s who’s reshaping healththcare for the AI age. Read the roundup
• This Nature paper argues for an optimistic outlook on the future of AI - Throughout history, humans have always co-evolved with tools. Could this just be the next leap? Read the paper