Quotes from Luis von Ahn

Basically, I want to make all of humanity more efficient by exploiting the human cycles that get wasted.

Am I a slacker? I can be a slacker. When I was in college, most people got summer jobs for college or did research during college. I went home and watched TV the whole day for three months; it was really awesome.

Because education is such a broad area, I chose to focus on language learning.

I put a lot of weight on feelings and am weirdly in touch with them, which is not typical for an engineer.

My first computer was a Commodore 64. I got it as a present from my mom when I was eight years old, and all I wanted to do with that computer was play games.

Science fiction has done a really good job of scaring us into thinking that computers shouldn't get too smart, because as soon as they get really smart, they're going to take over the world and kill us, or something like that. But why would they do that?

The question that motivates my research is, if we can put a man on the Moon with 100,000 [people], what can we do with 100 million?

I am always able to keep a laser focus on one thing at a time without getting distracted. It helps that I try to break everything I do into small, achievable tasks.

[Captchas] are not only annoying, but they kill 10 seconds of your time.

Every time you buy tickets on Ticketmaster, you help to digitize a book.

Our team at Duolingo is really cohesive, but this did not just happen. I made a concerted effort to hire people who are going to play nice.

When I found out that I had won the MacArthur Fellowship, I had been a professor at Carnegie Mellon for a week. I probably shouldn't be saying this on TV, but I stopped worrying about tenure.

Game design is a funny thing. There are people out there who are really good at it, but it's not clear that they can teach it. It's a very intuitive process. It's an art.

The basic idea of Games With a Purpose is that we are taking a problem that computers cannot yet solve, and we are getting people to solve it for us while they are playing a game.

I definitely play some games, like Nintendo D.S. or the Wii, and some computer games.

As humanity goes online, it's becoming an extremely advanced, large-scale processing unit.

I watch a lot of TV. That's how I spend most of my time outside of work. If I had more time, I would fill it 100 percent with watching TV.

I have multiple ideas per day, all the time. The vast majority of these are completely idiotic. Usually, I just sit on the idea for several months. And if I have not decided that it's idiotic, then it's... might be a good idea.

I co-founded Duolingo with the mission of bringing free language education to the world.

My ultimate research goal is to transform our human existence to just eating, sleeping, drinking, playing - nevermind.