Luis von Ahn Quotations

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

People are good at figuring out what's attractive, and computers are good at quickly searching and finding. You put them together, and bang!

The current business model for language education is the student pays — in particular, the student pays Rosetta Stone $500. The problem with this business model is that 95 percent of the world’s population doesn’t have $500.