Now, AI has completely detonated a wave of global unemployment, and Duolingo’s layoffs are just the first of a domino. Foreign media statistics found that the world’s five largest companies have laid off tens of thousands of employees because of AI. Statistics show that the unemployment rate of American college graduates has recently reached an abnormally high level of 5.8%!
No kidding, the global unemployment wave brought about by AI is really coming!
In the past, this call was only sporadically predicted from the mouths of some people, but now, the mainstream media has fully recognized the fact that artificial intelligence will revolutionize the global labor market.
Recently, Forbes, TechCrunch and other media have issued warnings.
Now, due to the influence of AI, a large number of humans are already unemployed.
Obama and his team, for example, are now discussing the serious consequences of this matter.
When human jobs are encroached upon by AI, where should we go?
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“At first, no one cared about this disaster, it was just a wildfire, a drought, the extinction of a species, the disappearance of a city, until this disaster was relevant to everyone.”
There will be more and more of them
Everyone knows about Duolingo.
Even, this is not a new thing.
TechCrunch reporters interviewed a former Duolingo employee who said that as early as the end of 2023, the company had laid off 10% of its workforce, and there was also a round of layoffs in October 2024.
In these two major layoffs, first translators, followed by writers, were replaced by AI.
At the end of ’23, Duolingo’s reason for laying off employees was that a large amount of content production and translation had been simplified using models such as GPT-4.
The following is a layoff email from Duolingo.
A laid-off employee broke the news on Reddit that the reason given by the company is that AI can now replace creators, translators, and almost all similar positions.
It is said that only a few people are retained in each team and continue to work as “content editors”. Their job is to check the spam generated by AI and then click publish.
In addition, Duolingo also used GPT-4 to support the premium subscription version of Duolingo Max, using AI chatbots to help users practice conversations. They also have a proprietary AI model, Birdbrain, which provides users with personalized courses.
However, both the laid-off employees and Duolingo are actually very dissatisfied with this.
For laid-off employees, being replaced by AI is a heavy blow, and the instability of employment has also caused a mental shock, and they often have difficulty finding permanent jobs due to incomplete resumes.
Moreover, most of Duolingo’s employees are contract workers, and by virtue of this mechanism, the company can save a lot of costs without having to pay for benefits such as insurance, paid leave, and sick leave.
At the same time, users in Duolingo are concerned that if AI translation is used, experts with a deeper understanding of language, idioms, and cultural nuances will be deprived of the value of experts.
As early as the 2023 Future of Jobs Report, the World Economic Forum predicted that AI will change 23% of jobs in the next five years.
Now, two years later, this prediction has become more and more obvious.
The crisis may seem simple, but in essence, it is nothing more than “a series of management decisions made by executives to cut labor costs and strengthen control within the company.”
But the consequences are a brain drain in the creative industry, declining incomes for freelance artists, writers and illustrators, and a tendency for companies to hire fewer human employees.
In the view of foreign media reporter Brian Merchant, the so-called AI employment crisis is not a sudden “skynet arrival” catastrophe, but a layoff of thousands of federal employees under the banner of an AI-first strategy like DOGE.
American college students are unemployed upon graduation
Not only that, The Atlantic also found that the unemployment rate of American college graduates has been unusually high recently!
One likely explanation for this is that many companies are using AI to replace junior white-collar jobs, or in other words, the money that was originally used to recruit new employees is used to invest in AI tools.
Just past May Day, this foreign media found that some strange and worrying changes are taking place in the job market for college graduates in the United States recently.
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York said that in the past few months, the employment situation of fresh college graduates has deteriorated significantly, and the unemployment rate has reached 5.8%!
Unemployment rates among recent university graduates and other groups
Even MBA students who have just graduated from elite programs often struggle to find work.
At the same time, law school applications are surging, reminding us of how young people used continuing their education to avoid employment pressure during the financial crisis.
Derek Thompson, a contributor to The Atlantic, speculates that there may be three reasons for this phenomenon.
The first is that the labor market of young people has not yet recovered from the impact of the epidemic, and it can even be said that this great recession has been going on for a long time.
David Deming, an economist at Harvard University, has said that it is more difficult for young people to find jobs than before, and this has been going on for at least a decade.
Not only did the Great Recession lead to mass layoffs, but many employers also froze hiring. Just when the tech boom seemed to be coming, inflation made a comeback, causing the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates, directly dampening economic demand.
White-collar industries, especially the tech industry, have been hit particularly hard. Job openings in software development and IT operations have dropped significantly.
The second theory points to a deeper, more structural shift: universities are no longer able to give the workforce an advantage as they did 15 years ago.
According to research by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, 2010 was a turning point, after which the lifetime income gap between college and high school graduates stopped widening.
The third theory is the most terrifying – the weakness of the labor market for college graduates may be an early sign that AI is beginning to change the economy.
If we consider an economic indicator – the gap in fresh graduates, the difference between the unemployment rate of young college graduates and the unemployment rate of the overall labor force, we will find that it is not what it used to be.
Forty years ago, young college graduates were not as unemployed as they were relatively cheap labor.
But just last month, the employment gap among college graduates hit a record low.
It can be said that the economic environment in which American college graduates are stepping into today is worse than in any month in 40 years.
Law firms and consulting firms are beginning to realize that five 22-year-olds can complete the work of 20 fresh graduates using ChatGPT.
Moreover, even if employers do not directly replace human employees with AI, high spending on AI infrastructure will crowd out the share left by companies for new employees.
In short, the labor market for college graduates is turning on a yellow light.
It’s the turn of AI to work
In short, more and more companies are now hiring you out of your desk “quietly”.
This time, you are really going to be replaced by AI, which is not speculation, but a fact that is happening.
Thank you for your hard work, and now it’s AI’s turn to work.
From customer service to translators, from pricing experts to tax advisors, more and more companies are hiring an AI that never complains.
Unbelief? Take a look at the current status of the 5 companies below.
From 2024 to 2025, at least five well-known companies around the world – Klarna, UPS, Duolingo, Intuit, and Cisco – will lay off tens of thousands of employees, directly or indirectly, because “AI is more efficient”.
The reason is that “we are not replacing humans with AI, we are just letting humans use AI to improve efficiency.”
Sounds reasonable, until you find out that human work, snap, is gone!
Klarna
Klarna, a leading buy-now-pay-later fintech company abroad, announced layoffs of more than 1,000 people in 2024, accounting for about 10% of its global workforce.
At the time, the news immediately made the headlines of Forbes.
The company has invested heavily in AI to handle customer service inquiries, process transactions, and optimize its operations.
Klarna has created an AI assistant that is equivalent to the workload of 700 full-time employees.
Klarna’s CEO openly discussed how AI-powered chatbots and automated systems can perform tasks that were once managed by human agents, such as answering customer queries and processing refunds.
By integrating generative AI, Klarna aims to scale its services while reducing operational costs, with reports suggesting that AI now handles a large number of customer interactions.
UPS
In early 2025, United Parcel Service (UPS) announced plans to lay off 20,000 employees, one of the largest in UPS’s 116-year history.
UPS CEO Carol Tomé frankly said that behind this layoff, it is actually because of AI and machine learning technology.
The work that used to require human pricing experts to write sales proposals is now done by AI, which is more efficient and less costly.
Although UPS still claims on the surface that “it is not AI that has replaced humans”, in fact, everyone can see that the company has begun to use AI to optimize logistics routes and handle customer communication, so naturally it no longer needs so many employees.
To put it bluntly, this wave of operations is that companies want to save money, and AI has become the most convenient cost-cutting tool.
There are many neighboring countries
Duolingo announced plans to replace contract workers with AI this week and become an “AI-first company,” a move that seems to indicate that the AI-induced employment crisis “has arrived.”
The news was made public on LinkedIn by Duolingo’s chief engineering officer.
The CEO drew a “big pie” when he sent an internal letter on LinkedIn: in the future, the company’s content production, employee performance evaluation, and even recruitment decisions will rely on AI.
As a result, Duolingo took the lead and cut 10% of its contract translators, saying that it was because AI was already capable of doing their jobs, such as automatically translating course materials, and it could cover more than 100 languages.
Although the company emphasized: “No regular employees are fired!” ——But in fact, the direction is already very clear: AI can also do the work of translation.
Intuit
Intuit, a financial software company, is a multinational computer software company headquartered in California, USA, which mainly produces financial and tax refund-related software.
About 1,800 people will be laid off in 2024, but the money saved will not be used to pay dividends, but all of it will be smashed into AI.
AI is a key component of its future strategy, especially in automating customer service, data analysis, and tax preparation processes.
The company’s senior management is very frank: the focus of the future is artificial intelligence, which used to rely on a large number of employees to do these tasks, but now AI can do it with one click.
Cisco
Technology giant Cisco has also joined the ranks of “AI first” – after officially announcing a 7% layoff, almost 5,600 people
The company has been integrating AI into its network solutions, such as predictive analytics for network management and automated customer support systems.
On the surface, this is the company making strategic adjustments, but in fact it is a lot of work that used to require people to do, but now AI can also do it. Cisco’s wave of operations is actually just a microcosm of the technology circle: replacing manpower with AI, improving efficiency, and reducing costs has become a tacit understanding in the industry.
Will companies with AI replacing employees succeed or fail?
Back in January 2024, Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor at Stanford University, said that savvy companies would not replace workers or jobs with artificial intelligence.
He said that AI and humans should be used together because they each have different strengths, and AI should “complement” manpower, not replace it.
But time has passed, and the development of AI’s capabilities has reached a new level.
In early 2025, many world-renowned companies began to lay off employees intensively – for one reason: AI is becoming more efficient and cheaper.
Klarna replaced 700 employees with AI customer service; UPS laid off thousands of back-office jobs and shifted to automated processes; Duolingo has significantly reduced its content team and relied on AI-generated question banks instead.
Instead of choosing “human-machine collaboration”, these companies decisively bet on “AI first”.
When generative AI first appeared, it was considered a good partner for humans.
But when AI has developed to this day, it seems that AI is no longer a partner of humans, but has become a competitor or even a replacement.
These companies are proving with practical actions that under the business logic of efficiency is king and cost first, AI is not an “auxiliary tool”, but an “optimal solution”!
This is not only a technological innovation, but also a workplace earthquake.
In the past, people fantasized that AI could help migrant workers get rid of tedium and focus on creativity.
The reality is that the more repetitive the work, the easier it is to be killed by AI; The more process-oriented the position, the faster it will be swallowed up by algorithms.
Society may be standing at a tipping point:
From AI to assist humans, humans need to learn to cooperate with AI;
from optimizing posts to canceling posts;
From improving productivity to reshaping production relations.
And this change, without waiting for everyone to be ready, has already begun quietly.
Resources:
https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/04/is-duolingo-the-face-of-an-ai-jobs-crisis/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2025/05/04/its-time-to-get-concerned-klarna-ups-duolingo-cisco-and-many-other-companies-are-replacing-workers-with-ai/
