Luis von Ahn
Luis von Ahn
Luis von Ahnis a Guatemalan entrepreneur and an associate professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. He is known as one of the pioneers of crowdsourcing. He is the founder of the company reCAPTCHA, which was sold to Google in 2009, and the co-founder and CEO of Duolingo, a popular language-learning platform...
NationalityGuatemalan
ProfessionBusinessman
CountryGuatemala
computers fiction good job scaring science soon thinking
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?
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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.
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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.
typical weight weirdly
I put a lot of weight on feelings and am weirdly in touch with them, which is not typical for an engineer.
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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.
hire people
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.
carnegie professor stopped won worrying
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.
eight mom
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.
becoming extremely goes humanity processing
As humanity goes online, it's becoming an extremely advanced, large-scale processing unit.
efficient exploiting
Basically, I want to make all of humanity more efficient by exploiting the human cycles that get wasted.
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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.