Duolingo, which describes itself as the world’s most popular language-learning platform, reported nearly 47 million daily active users earlier this year. The app, known for its gamified, bite-sized language lessons, recently expanded into subjects like music, math, and chess.
“I really want to have a positive impact on education,” explains Duolingo co-founder and CEO Luis von Ahn on View From The Top: The Podcast. “I want it to be the case that we can show that screen time is actually useful for the world. For the first time ever, with phones, we can reach billions of people.”
Before Duolingo, von Ahn was involved in pioneering CAPTCHA, a verification test that protects websites from bots. He also invented reCAPTCHA, another bot-beater, which he sold to Google.
Von Ahn had begun to unlock the power of gamification. “It occurred to me that maybe there’s all kinds of things that computers could not solve that we get people to solve by just turning them into a game, and so I started doing that. I started making games,” he recalls.
In a conversation with Ayesha Karnik, MBA ’25 at Stanford Graduate School of Business, von Ahn reflects on the evolution of human-computer interaction, his move from teaching computer science to running a company, and how AI will impact how we work.
“What we’re going to have our employees do is basically go up a level.… I think we’re just going to bring everybody up a level so that they can spend their time on the more creative tasks rather than these repetitive things. I’m very excited about it, and no, we’re not laying off anyone.”