The Big Interview: Duolingo’s Luis von Ahn on AI, Mission, and Why the World Still Needs Language Learning When ChatGPT Exists
By Katie Drummond
Luis von Ahn could have retired to a tropical beach decades ago, if he’d wanted. Best known today as the CEO of global learning app Duolingo, von Ahn first made his name in the 2000s as the inventor of CAPTCHA—those famously frustrating little online checks that force users to prove they’re not a robot. When he sold reCAPTCHA to Google in 2009, he walked away with enough wealth to step back from work for good at a young age. Instead, he jumped straight into his next venture: a company rooted in his childhood growing up in Guatemala, which is now one of the most prominent education platforms on the planet.
Von Ahn’s mother, a doctor, poured every extra penny of her income into sending him to private school, opening opportunities most of his Guatemalan peers never got. As he tells me in this week’s Big Interview, that experience is the entire reason he founded Duolingo more than a decade ago, with a core mission: make high-quality education free and widely available to everyone, everywhere. Today, the platform counts more than 130 million active users across the globe, from immigrants building new lives by learning a new language to A-list celebrities like George Clooney.
Educational inequality sparked von Ahn’s mission, but today Duolingo sits at the center of a far newer conversation: artificial intelligence. As AI rapidly reshapes how we learn, how companies operate, and how workers think about their value, I wanted to know how it’s shifting Duolingo’s internal strategy, expansion plans, and long-term sustainability. If AI can translate nearly anything in any format, simulate natural conversation, generate custom lesson plans, and personalize instruction… does the world actually still need Duolingo?
Von Ahn’s answer is unambiguous: Duolingo is already thriving thanks to generative AI, and users will keep flocking to its gamified, motivational approach to learning long-term. In our conversation, he opened up about building a mission-first public company on Wall Street, why he doesn’t lose sleep over dips in Duolingo’s share price, and how Duolingo delivers learning in a way AI alone cannot match.
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.
DRUMMOND: We always kick these conversations off with a few quick warm-up questions to get you thinking. You ready?
VON AHN: Sure.
DRUMMOND: What’s one language you’re dying to master but haven’t gotten there yet?
VON AHN: Swedish. I’m actively learning it, but I still need to get a lot better. My wife is Swedish.
DRUMMOND: That’s a pretty good motivation—you’ve got to get on it.
VON AHN: I am on it.
DRUMMOND: What job do you think AI should never do?
VON AHN: A lot of jobs. I think any role where humans need inspiration, like teaching. Humans need to feel inspired by other people—it’s pretty hard to get that from AI.
DRUMMOND: I agree. AI definitely has an inspiration gap. You were 28 when you got the MacArthur “genius grant.” What did you do with the money?
VON AHN: I put it in the bank. I was incredibly grateful and proud to receive it, but that’s all I did with it at first. Eventually, most of that money ended up going to getting Duolingo off the ground, I think.
DRUMMOND: What language has the most absurd grammar rules?
VON AHN: Finnish and Hungarian are really hard, and they have some really strange rules. But I don’t know if it’s about the rules being inherently ridiculous. If a language is very different from your native tongue, it just feels weird and absurd by default.
DRUMMOND: My sister’s learning Mandarin right now, and I’m pretty sure she’d agree with that.
VON AHN: Mandarin is definitely a hard language to learn.
DRUMMOND: She’s having a rough go of it—she’s using Duolingo, taking it one day at a time. Now, you invented CAPTCHA. Do you want to apologize to me and our audience now, or save it for later?
VON AHN: Look, I am sorry. For the record, it wasn’t just me. It was a team project with my PhD advisor. But yeah, I apologize. I’m sorry.
DRUMMOND: Thank you, we appreciate that. The entire internet does too. Let’s dive in. You launched Duolingo roughly 15 years ago, right?
VON AHN: Yeah, around 2011.
DRUMMOND: The original idea was a crowdsourced translation tool. Fast forward to 2026, I can translate English to any language right on my AirPods. With generative AI and all the new tools that have come from it, there’s a lingering question: what does this mean for learning—not just language learning, but how we think about learning as an activity overall. How would you describe Duolingo today, big picture? What’s changed since those early days?
VON AHN: At its core, Duolingo is a platform for learning. We still focus mostly on languages, but we don’t stop there—we also teach math, music, and chess now. The desire to learn hasn’t gone down at all. Humans still want to learn new things; knowing more makes life richer and better.
Even when it comes to translation, computerized translation has been nearly perfect for major languages for over a decade. Google Translate was already essentially perfect between English and Spanish back in 2015, for example. But we haven’t seen any drop in people wanting to learn languages at all. In fact, interest has only gone up.
There are two big reasons for that. The biggest one, at least for our users, is that most people learning a non-native language do it as a hobby. Whether a computer can translate for you doesn’t matter for a hobby. A great example is chess: computers have been better at chess than humans since they beat the world champion decades ago. But people still want to learn to play chess themselves. It just doesn’t matter what computers can do. That’s the first big reason.
The second reason is half of our users are learning English, and for most of them, that’s not just a hobby. Knowing English directly improves your life in tangible ways—it usually means you can earn more money. For example, if you’re a waiter in a non-English speaking country, learning English lets you work at a higher-paying tourist hotel, right? So we just haven’t seen demand for language learning drop at all.
DRUMMOND: Let’s talk about your background, which really explains why Duolingo exists the way it does. Can you tell me about your home life growing up in Guatemala? Is there a specific memory that stands out as transformative?
VON AHN: I grew up in Guatemala. People often paint it as a really bleak place—I was born and grew up during the civil war, which sounds terrible, but it wasn’t that bad for me personally. I lived in Guatemala City, which was pretty sheltered from the worst of the conflict, and I grew up in a middle-class neighborhood, so it was mostly safe. It was just me, my mom, and my grandma living together—the three of us.
I have a lot of memories, but the one that changed everything was when my mom came home one day with a computer. I was 7 years old, and I’d never used one before. All I wanted was a Nintendo. She brought home a Commodore 64, and I was actually pretty upset about it at first. It’s so funny—even today my mom has never used a computer in her life. She doesn’t have a smartphone, she just has a flip phone, she’s not on the internet at all.
But she got me that computer, and it changed my entire life. This was the mid-to-late 1980s, and computers were not easy to use back then. I had to teach myself how to use it, and it was really frustrating for a whole year before I could do anything interesting with it. But I stuck with it, and that changed everything for me.
DRUMMOND: You went to the American School of Guatemala. You’ve said before that it gave you a window into a different world and shaped your whole worldview. Can you expand on that?
VON AHN: I was incredibly lucky. My mom was a physician, but to put that in context: doctors in Guatemala aren’t wealthy like they are in the US. My mom worked for the Guatemalan government, so we were solidly middle class. But she spent every extra dollar she had, after paying for food and basic needs, on my education.
That school was where all the kids of wealthy Guatemalans, the children of ambassadors, everyone like that went. Even though I wasn’t rich, I got the same education rich kids got, and that completely changed how I saw the world. Everyone else in my neighborhood went to public school or a lower-tier middle class school, and I could see the difference in what we were learning, and how that opened up opportunities I would never have had otherwise. Because of that education, I was able to come to the US for college, for example.
That experience completely changed how I think about education. A lot of people say education is what brings different social classes together, but I always saw the opposite. Wealthy people can already afford way better education than everyone else. We’re sitting here in New York. Rich people in New York can pay $60,000 a year for an incredible education, and it’s probably worth every penny. People with almost no money, especially in poor countries, sometimes barely learn to read and write—that’s all they get. That’s why I wanted to start Duolingo: I wanted to build something that gives a great education to everyone in the world. I’m really proud that we’ve actually done that. Today, we have more than 100 million active users, and they run the full gamut—from Syrian refugees across Europe learning the language of their new home to wealthy, famous people like George Clooney, who’s said he uses it.
DRUMMOND: I saw that headline when I was researching this interview and immediately clicked through.
VON AHN: And he’s not the only one—lots of wealthy famous people use it. So wealthy people already have access to way better opportunities than Syrian refugees, but on Duolingo, everyone uses the exact same platform. More money can’t buy you a better version of Duolingo. That’s exactly what we set out to do.
DRUMMOND: You’re a public company, so there’s a lot of pressure to hit financial targets. How do you pull off keeping the experience the same for everyone, from George Clooney to a refugee who needs to learn a new language to build a new life?
VON AHN: At the end of the day, we’re a very mission-driven company. We care deeply about building the best education in the world and making it available to everyone. But I also truly believe that in the long run, this mission can also build a huge, successful business.
Right now we have around 135 million active users. If we can get to 500 million, then a billion active users, that’s a massive business. Not everyone pays—about 10% of our active users pay for Duolingo Plus, and 90% use the free version. So George Clooney pays, and a lot of other people don’t. That’s still a huge business, and I’m totally fine with that model. By the way, our free users tell their friends about Duolingo, and some of those friends end up paying. We love our free users—they’re core to what we do.
DRUMMOND: I don’t want to harp on CAPTCHA, but going back to your career path: after you built reCAPTCHA and sold it to Google, you were young enough to retire for good, if you wanted. You could have built that dream beach house, bought whatever you wanted, done whatever you wanted. You didn’t. Why not?
VON AHN: When I sold to Google in 2009, I did actually think about retiring.
DRUMMOND: What did that dream retirement look like to you?
VON AHN: Everyone says a house on a beach, but the funny thing is I hate sand. But that wasn’t the real reason I went back to work anyway. The real reason is that I knew retiring would be boring for me. I need to always be working on something new. So I pretty quickly started working on other projects.
DRUMMOND: It only took about a year and a half after selling to go all in on Duolingo, right?
VON AHN: Yeah, about 18 months.
DRUMMOND: I heard Bill Gates once tried to convince you to join Microsoft, and you turned him down to do your own thing. That’s pretty bold. Do you think you’d be a terrible employee?
VON AHN: I don’t know if I’d be terrible. I just had a bunch of things I really wanted to do on my own. Microsoft actually offered me a role at Microsoft Research, which is an amazing place. But I just really wanted to build my own thing.
I don’t think I would have been a bad employee—I follow rules, so I think I would have been fine. But I’m way happier doing what I’m doing now. This work is all about education, which I care deeply about. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve started thinking: what do I want people to remember me for, if anything? I want it to be something related to education.
DRUMMOND: You’re already thinking about your legacy?
VON AHN: I am—not that I’m dying anytime soon, but it’s something I think about. I want my legacy to be about giving people access to education.
DRUMMOND: Can you talk about building and scaling Duolingo from scratch? As a first-time CEO, going from zero to almost 1,000 employees now, what were the biggest challenges you faced along the way?
VON AHN: The job of CEO changes a lot as the company grows. When you only have two or three employees, it’s a completely different job than when you have 100, or almost 1,000 like we do now. The job has changed so much that one of the hardest parts was growing alongside the company.
A lot of people might not agree with this, but I think when a company is going from zero to 20 people, the best thing a CEO can do is micromanage.
DRUMMOND: So you’re in the weeds with every single one of the other 19 employees?
VON AHN: Yeah. If micromanaging still worked at 1,000 people, I’d still do it. It just stops working after a certain size.
At some point you have to figure out what’s not working anymore, and evolve. The other big challenge for me specifically is that I’m naturally conflict-avoidant. That’s not a great trait for a CEO.
DRUMMOND: Yeah, I can imagine that would be tough.
VON AHN: The first person I had to fire at Duolingo, I ended up having to do it three times. The first two times, I sugarcoated it so much that they didn’t realize they were fired, and they showed up to work the next day. That really happened.
DRUMMOND: Oh wow. What happened the second time?
VON AHN: I sugarcoated it again! I thought I was being firmer, but I wasn’t. The third time I had to be pretty blunt: “You’re being fired. Do you understand that?” I’ve learned a lot since then. If you have something hard to say to someone, don’t beat around the bush. Just say it, then work through the aftermath.
DRUMMOND: There’s actually a kindness to direct communication.
VON AHN: It took me years to learn that. Guatemalan culture is very indirect. I joke that in Guatemala, the way you say yes is just “yes.” The way you say no is you go, “yeah…” That’s how people communicate. I’ve had to learn to be much more direct.
DRUMMOND: Duolingo has always been headquartered in Pittsburgh, and it still is. There is a tech scene there, for people who don’t know. What has it meant for the company to be based in Pittsburgh, good or bad, instead of the obvious choice like Silicon Valley?
VON AHN: Pittsburgh was great for us early on, and it still is. One big reason is that education, what we focus on, isn’t a passing fad. In Silicon Valley, everyone is always chasing the latest fad. There’s nothing wrong with that—right now the fad is AI, which is great. But if you want to focus on building something long-term in education, it’s really nice to be in a place where we can just take the time we need to build our product right. It took us years to build the system we have now, and it was a blessing that we were basically left alone to do that work.
The other big benefit of Pittsburgh is that it let us build an executive team that’s better than we probably would have gotten anywhere else. A lot of our early executive team ended up in Pittsburgh for personal reasons: they had aging parents, they had other reasons they needed to be here. If they’d been in San Francisco, they would have taken jobs at much bigger companies—they already had experience at big tech firms before. But because they were in Pittsburgh, we were the best opportunity in town, so they joined us.
To be fair, we have big offices in other places now, including New York, where I spend more than half my time. So having other locations helps, but overall Pittsburgh has been really good for us.
DRUMMOND: You mentioned AI earlier when talking about Silicon Valley fads. Back in 2025 you sent an internal memo saying Duolingo would shift to be “AI-first”—that AI wasn’t just for productivity, it would help get closer to our mission. That memo got posted to your LinkedIn, and the public comments were pretty scathing. A lot of people even joked that AI should replace CEOs. Can you talk about the thinking behind that memo, and why it got such a negative public reaction?
VON AHN: Internally, that memo wasn’t controversial at all. This is just how we’ve operated since we launched Duolingo: we’ve always bet on technology to teach people better. We’ve always used whatever AI was available at the time—even before large language
