Luis Von Ahn Quotes

#1. 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.

Luis Von Ahn

#2. 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.

Luis Von Ahn

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

Luis Von Ahn

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

Luis Von Ahn

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

Luis Von Ahn

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

Luis Von Ahn

#7. 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.

Luis Von Ahn

#8. 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.

Luis Von Ahn

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

Luis Von Ahn

#10. 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.

Luis Von Ahn

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

Luis Von Ahn

#12. 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?

Luis Von Ahn

#13. Before the Internet, coordinating more than 100,000 people, let alone paying them, was essentially impossible. But now with the Internet, I've just shown you a project where we've gotten 750 million people to help us digitize human knowledge.

Luis Von Ahn

#14. 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.

Luis Von Ahn

#15. 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.

Luis Von Ahn

#16. 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?

Luis Von Ahn

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

Luis Von Ahn

#18. 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.

Luis Von Ahn

#19. 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.

Luis Von Ahn

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

Luis Von Ahn