Duolingo’s Luis von Ahn Wants to Delete the Blockchain

Luis von Ahn could have retired to a beach somewhere years ago. Best known as the CEO of the learning app Duolingo, von Ahn in the early 2000s invented the captcha, those infuriating little online tests that force people to prove they’re not robots. But after selling his creation to Google in 2009, von Ahn didn’t waste any time launching his next venture: a company borne of his experience growing up in Guatemala, one that’s now among the most prominent education platforms in the world.

Von Ahn’s mom, a doctor, spent all of her extra income to send him to private school, giving von Ahn opportunities that most of his peers never saw. It is, as he tells me in this week’s Big Interview, the reason he founded Duolingo more than a decade ago, with the goal of making high-quality education free and widely available. Today, the company reaches more than 130 million users worldwide, from immigrants learning new languages to celebrities like George Clooney.

Inequality may have inspired von Ahn, but his company now sits at the center of a different conversation: Artificial intelligence. As AI rapidly changes the way people learn, how companies run, and how workers contemplate their worth, I wondered how it was informing Duolingo’s own inner workings, plans for expansion, and potentially its long-term sustainability. If AI can translate just about anything, in any medium, and readily simulate conversation, generate lesson plans, and personalize instruction … does the world still need Duolingo?

Von Ahn is unequivocal in his view: Not only is Duolingo already benefiting from generative AI, he says, but people will continue relishing the opportunity to learn new things using its gamified, motivational approach. In our conversation, he talks about building a mission-driven company within Wall Street constraints, why he doesn’t mind dips in the company’s share price, and why Duolingo can keep users learning in ways that AI cannot.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

KATIE DRUMMOND: Luis von Ahn, welcome to The Big Interview.

LUIS VON AHN: Thank you for having me.

We always start these conversations with a few quick questions, like a warmup for your brain. Are you ready?

Sure.

What’s the language you’d desperately love to learn, but haven't gotten around to yet?

Swedish. I am learning it, but I need to get better at it. My wife is Swedish.

That's a good reason. You better get on that.

I'm on it.

What job do you think AI should never do?

A lot of jobs. I think that anything where humans need to be inspired, like teachers. Humans need to be inspired. It's kind of hard to get inspired by AI.

I agree. I think AI has a bit of an inspiration problem. You were 28 when you received the MacArthur “genius” grant. What did you do with the money?

I put it in the bank. I was very happy to have received that. I'm very proud. But yeah, I basically put it in the bank. Eventually that probably ended up being spent setting things up for Duolingo.

What language has the most ridiculous grammar rules?

Finnish and Hungarian are pretty hard to learn and have strange rules. But generally, I don't know if it's about ridiculousness. It's generally that languages that are far from your native language just feel ridiculous, feel weird.

My sister is learning Mandarin right now, and I think she would testify to that.

That is a hard language to learn.

She's having a rough time. She's using Duolingo, you know, one day at a time. Now, you invented captcha. Would you like to apologize to me and our audience now, or do you want to find an opportunity to do it later in the podcast?

Look, I am sorry. By the way, it wasn't just me.

Sure.

It was a team effort with my PhD adviser. But um, yeah, I apologize. I’m sorry.

Thank you. I appreciate that. So does the entire internet. Now let's get into it. I want to set the stage a little bit. You started Duolingo, what, 15 years ago?

Yeah, 2011-ish.

The idea at the time was to create this crowdsource translation tool. Fast-forward to 2026, the company has transformed a great deal since then, but I can now translate English into any language on my AirPods, right? Then, with gen AI and all of the products that have come with that technology, there is this simmering question: What does this mean for learning? Not just language but the way we interact with the idea of learning. How do you describe Duolingo today? Big picture, what has changed?

Generally, Duolingo was a platform to learn things. Primarily we teach languages. But we don't just teach languages. We also teach math, music, and chess.

I think the desire to learn has not gone down. In general, humans still need to learn things. It just makes life better if you know things. It's fuller.

In the case of translation, computer language translation has been almost perfect for the major languages for like a decade now. Google Translate in 2015 between English and Spanish, for example, was essentially perfect. But we have not seen the desire to learn a language go down at all.

That’s interesting.

In fact, we've seen it increase. I think there's two reasons for that. The biggest one, at least for our users, is that most of the people that are learning a language that is not English are doing so as a hobby. Whether a computer can do something or not doesn't matter for a hobby.

A good example is chess. Computers have been better at chess than humans since 1997 when a computer beat the world chess champion. People really want to learn chess. So, it kind of doesn't matter. That's one big reason.

The other reason is half of our users are learning English; they actually want to learn English. That is not a hobby. I mean, maybe for some of them it's a hobby, but generally just knowledge of English makes your life better in all kinds of ways. Usually you can make more money, and it's pretty direct.

For example, if you live in a non-English-speaking country and you're a waiter and you learn English, you can become a waiter at a hotel that pays better, right?

So we just have not seen the desire to learn a language go down at all.

I do think it's important to talk about your background, which is really interesting, because it helps the origin story of Duolingo make a lot of sense. Can you talk about your home life growing up? Is there a memory that stands out in your mind?

I grew up in Guatemala. It's funny, you can paint that picture in multiple ways. You can paint it in a really bleak manner. I was born and I grew up while Guatemala was having a civil war. So that sounds terrible, but it wasn't that bad for me. I lived in Guatemala City, which was a little isolated from the civil war. I was also in a middle-class neighborhood, so things were safe-ish. At home, it was just me and my mom and also living with my grandma. So it was the three of us.

There's a lot of memories, but one very transformative one was when my mom came home one day with a computer. I had never used a computer. I was 7 years old. What I really wanted was a Nintendo. She brought me a Commodore 64. I was actually pretty upset. I don't know why she did that. My mom, to this day, she's never used a computer in her entire life. She also doesn't have a smartphone. She has a flip phone. She is not on the internet.

I respect this, if I'm being honest. Good for her.

But she got me a computer, and that changed my life. So this was in the mid to late ’80s. Computers were not easy to use. I had to learn how to use it. It was very frustrating. It was about a year until I could do anything of note with this computer, but I kind of stuck to it, and that changed my life.

You went to the American School of Guatemala. You've talked before about how it gave you a window into another world or filled out your worldview. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

I was very fortunate that my mother was a physician. Another piece of context: in Gu