The Big Interview: Luis von Ahn on Duolingo, AI, and Why the World Still Needs Language Learning
Luis von Ahn could have retired to a quiet beach somewhere decades ago. Best known today as CEO of the global learning app Duolingo, von Ahn first made his mark in the 2000s as the inventor of CAPTCHA—those notoriously frustrating tiny online checks that force users to prove they are not robots. After selling his reCAPTCHA project to Google in 2009, von Ahn didn’t cash out and step away. Instead, he launched his next venture, rooted in his childhood growing up in Guatemala: a platform that would grow to become one of the world’s most prominent education technology companies.
Von Ahn’s mother, a physician, spent every extra dollar she earned to send him to private school, giving him opportunities most of his peers in Guatemala never had. That experience is why he founded Duolingo more than a decade ago, with a core mission to make high-quality education free and universally accessible. Today, the platform serves more than 130 million active users worldwide, from immigrants building new lives by learning a local language to A-list celebrities like George Clooney.
While educational inequality inspired von Ahn’s work, Duolingo now sits at the center of a far newer conversation: artificial intelligence. As AI rapidly rewrites how people learn, how companies operate, and how workers think about their own skills and value, I wanted to ask how it is shaping Duolingo’s internal operations, expansion plans, and long-term future. If AI can translate nearly any content across any format, simulate natural conversation, generate lesson plans, and personalize instruction on demand… does the world still need Duolingo?
Von Ahn’s answer is unwavering: Duolingo is already leveraging generative AI to improve its product, and users will keep flocking to its gamified, motivation-focused approach to learning that AI alone cannot replicate. In our conversation, he opens up about building a mission-driven company under Wall Street pressure, why he isn’t sweating recent dips in Duolingo’s share price, and what makes the platform irreplaceable even in the age of generative AI. 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.
KATIE DRUMMOND: We always open with a few quick warm-up questions to get your brain moving. You ready?
LUIS VON AHN: Sure.
KATIE DRUMMOND: What language have you been dying to learn but haven’t mastered yet?
LUIS VON AHN: Swedish. I’m actively learning it, I just need to get better. My wife is Swedish—that’s all the motivation I need.
KATIE DRUMMOND: That’s a great reason, you’d better get on it.
LUIS VON AHN: I am on it.
KATIE DRUMMOND: What job do you think AI should never do?
LUIS VON AHN: A lot of jobs. Any role where humans need inspiration, like teaching. It’s really hard to feel inspired by AI, right?
KATIE DRUMMOND: I agree—AI definitely has an inspiration problem. You got the MacArthur “genius grant” when you were just 28. What did you do with the prize money?
LUIS VON AHN: I put it in the bank. I was incredibly grateful and proud to get it, but that’s what I did with it. Eventually, a lot of that money went into getting Duolingo off the ground, actually.
KATIE DRUMMOND: What language has the most ridiculous grammar rules?
LUIS VON AHN: Finnish and Hungarian are both really hard, with really strange rules. But I don’t know if it’s about the rules being inherently ridiculous—any language that’s really distant from your native tongue just feels weird and absurd. My sister’s learning Mandarin right now, and she’d definitely back that up. It’s a brutal language to learn, she’s having a really hard time. She uses Duolingo, takes it one day at a time.
KATIE DRUMMOND: Now, you invented CAPTCHA. Would you like to apologize to me and our audience now, or save it for later in the show?
LUIS VON AHN: Look, I am sorry. For what it’s worth, it wasn’t just me. It was a team project with my PhD advisor. But yeah, I apologize. I’m sorry.
KATIE DRUMMOND: Thank you—we appreciate that. So does the entire internet. Alright, let’s dive in. You started Duolingo roughly 15 years ago, right?
LUIS VON AHN: Yeah, around 2011.
KATIE DRUMMOND: The original idea back then was a crowdsourced translation tool. Fast forward to today, I can translate English to any language instantly right on my AirPods. With generative AI and all the new tools that have come from that technology, there’s a persistent question hanging over the space: what does this mean for learning? Not just language learning, but how we think about learning at all. How would you describe Duolingo today, big picture? What’s changed from those early days?
LUIS VON AHN: At its core, Duolingo has always been a platform for learning. We’re still best known for language teaching, but we’ve expanded beyond that too—we now offer courses in math, music, and chess. The desire to learn new things hasn’t gone down at all. Humans are wired to want to learn, it just makes life richer and more fulfilling when you know new things.
Even when it comes to translation, computer-powered language translation has been nearly flawless for major languages for over a decade. Google Translate was already basically perfect between English and Spanish back in 2015, but we haven’t seen demand for language learning drop at all. In fact, it’s grown.
There are two big reasons for that. The biggest one, for most of our users, is that most people learning a second language do it as a hobby. Whether a computer can translate for you doesn’t matter when it’s something you do for fun. A good parallel is chess: computers have been better at chess than humans since the late 1990s, when Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov. But more people than ever want to learn to play chess. It just doesn’t matter that computers are better. That’s a huge reason interest holds up.
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 and your earning potential in so many ways. If you’re a waiter in a non-English-speaking country, learning English lets you move to a higher-paying job at a tourist hotel, for example. That’s a direct, tangible benefit. So we just haven’t seen that demand go away at all.
KATIE DRUMMOND: It’s impossible to understand Duolingo without your background growing up. Can you talk about what your home life was like in Guatemala? Is there a specific memory that sticks out as especially formative?
LUIS VON AHN: I grew up in Guatemala during the country’s civil war. People often paint a really bleak picture of my childhood because of that, but it wasn’t that bad for me. I lived in Guatemala City, which was pretty insulated from the worst of the conflict, and I grew up in a middle-class neighborhood, so it was pretty safe for the most part. It was just me, my mom, and my grandma living together—just the three of us.
There’s one memory that really changed everything. One day my mom came home with a computer. I was 7 years old, I’d never touched a computer before. I really wanted a Nintendo, and she brought home a Commodore 64. I was actually upset about it! It’s so funny to think about now. My mom has never used a computer in her life, even to this day. She doesn’t have a smartphone, just a flip phone, she’s never been on the internet. I respect that, honestly. But that computer changed my life.
This was the mid-to-late 1980s, and computers were nothing like they are now—they were really hard to use. It took me a whole year before I could do anything interesting with it, it was so frustrating at first. But I stuck with it, and that changed the entire trajectory of my life.
KATIE DRUMMOND: You went to the American School of Guatemala. You’ve talked before about how that school opened up your worldview. Can you expand on that?
LUIS VON AHN: I was incredibly lucky. My mom was a physician, but context matters: in Guatemala, doctors aren’t wealthy like they are in the US. She worked for the Guatemalan public health system, so we were solidly middle class. But she spent every extra dollar she had, after paying for food and rent, on my education. That school was where all the kids of wealthy Guatemalans and ambassadors went. Even though I wasn’t rich, I got the same education those rich kids got, and that completely changed how I saw the world.
All the other kids in my neighborhood went to public schools or lower-tier middle-class schools, so I saw first-hand the difference in what I was learning, and the difference in the opportunities that education opened up for me. Because of that education, I was able to come to the US for college, and so on. That experience completely shaped how I see education.
A lot of people talk about education as the great equalizer, that it brings social classes together. But I always saw the opposite: wealthy people can get way better education, and that just widens the gap. Look at New York, where we are right now: wealthy people here pay $60,000 a year for a top-tier education, and it’s absolutely worth it for them. But people with very little 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: to build something that gives a great education to everyone in the world, no matter where they’re born or how much money they have. That’s what we set out to do, and I’m really proud that we’ve delivered on that core promise so far.
Today, Duolingo has more than 100 million active users, and it’s for absolutely everyone—from Syrian refugees across Europe learning the language of their new home, to wealthy A-list celebrities. There was a news story that George Clooney uses Duolingo, and when I was researching this interview, I saw that headline and immediately clicked through. But he’s not the only one, a lot of famous, wealthy people use it. Wealthy people already have access to way better resources than a refugee learning a new language, 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 build.
KATIE DRUMMOND: You run a public company, so there are constant financial expectations from shareholders. How do you maintain that equal access model, where George Clooney gets the exact same experience as a refugee who needs to learn English to build a new life?
LUIS VON AHN: At the end of the day, we’re a deeply mission-driven company. That mission to build the best education in the world and make it universally available is what drives everything we do. But the thing is, I’m convinced that if we stick to that mission long-term, it will also build a massive, sustainable 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 huge business.
Not everyone pays. Around 10 percent of our active users pay for Duolingo Plus, and the other 90 percent use the free version. The George Clooneys of the world are often the paying users, and that’s fine—that supports the whole platform. That still adds up to a huge business. I’m totally comfortable with that model. And our free users aren’t a burden: they tell their friends about Duolingo, and some of those friends end up subscribing. We love our free users, full stop.
KATIE DRUMMOND: I don’t want to dig too much into CAPTCHA, but looking back at your career, after you built reCAPTCHA and sold it to Google, that payout meant you could have retired at a very young age. You could have built that beach house everyone talks about, bought sports cars, done whatever you want. But you didn’t. Why?
LUIS VON AHN: I sold reCAPTCHA to Google in 2009, and I did think about retiring.
KATIE DRUMMOND: What did that ideal retirement look like to you, when you thought about it?
LUIS VON AHN: Everyone says a house on the beach, but you know what’s funny? I hate sand. So that idea was dead before it even started. But the real reason I went back to work is that I knew retirement would be boring. I need to always be working on something, for one reason or another. So I pretty quickly started working on new projects.
KATIE DRUMMOND: It only took about a year and a half to get Duolingo off the ground, right?
LUIS VON AHN: Yeah, that’s right. About a year and a half.
KATIE 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 a pretty bold thing to say to Bill Gates. Do you think you’d be a terrible employee?
LUIS 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. The opportunity was to join Microsoft Research, which is an amazing place, don’t get me wrong. But I just really wanted to build my own thing. I’m a rule-follower by nature, so I think I would’ve been fine as an employee. But I’m so much happier doing what I want to do, especially when it comes to education. I really want to bring education to as many people as possible. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve started thinking about what I’ll be remembered for, if anything. I want that to be something related to education.
KATIE DRUMMOND: Can you talk about what it was like to actually build and scale Duolingo as a first-time CEO? You went from zero employees to close to a thousand now. What were the biggest challenges along the way?
LUIS VON AHN: The job of CEO changes completely as the company grows. When you only have two or three employees, it’s a totally different job than when you have 100, or the almost 1,000 we have now. The job shifts so much, so one of the hardest parts is growing alongside the company.
A lot of people might not agree with this, but I think when a company is still tiny, going from zero to 20 people, the best thing a CEO can do is micromanage. You need to be in the weeds with every single person, working alongside them. If it still worked for 1,000 people, I’d still do it. But it stops working after you hit a certain size, so you have to adapt.
The other big challenge for me personally is that I’m naturally conflict-avoidant. That doesn’t mix super well with being a good CEO. The first person I ever had to fire from Duolingo, I had to do it three times. The first two times, I sugarcoated it so much that they didn’t even realize they were being fired, and they showed up to work the next day. It actually happened. The second time I did it, I thought I was being firmer, but I still sugarcoated it too much, and they still didn’t get it. The third time I had to be pretty blunt, just straight up say “You’re being fired, do you understand what that means?”
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. Direct communication is actually kinder than beating around the bush. That took me years to learn. Guatemalan culture is very indirect, right? I joke that in Guatemala, to say yes you just say “yes.” To say no, you just go “yeahhh…” and trail off. That’s how we communicate. I’ve had to learn to be much more direct.
KATIE DRUMMOND: Duolingo is headquartered in Pittsburgh, it’s always been based there. A lot of people don’t realize there’s a thriving tech scene there. What has it meant for the company to be based in Pittsburgh, good and bad, instead of the more obvious choice like Silicon Valley?
LUIS 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 tech fad. In Silicon Valley, everyone chases the next big fad. There’s nothing wrong with that, right now AI is the big fad, and that’s great. But if you want to build a long-term education product, it’s really nice to be in a place where we’ve been left alone to build something slowly. It took us years to build the product we have today, and that space to develop was a real blessing.
The other big advantage is that it let us build an executive team that’s better than we had any right to have early on. A lot of our early executive team ended up in Pittsburgh for personal reasons: they had aging parents, they had other ties that meant they needed to live there. If they’d been in San Francisco, they would’ve gotten poached by huge, established companies—most of them had worked at big tech companies before. But in Pittsburgh, we were the best game in town, so they joined us. That was a huge win.
To be fair, we have large offices in other places now, including New York, where I spend more than half my time now. It’s good to have a presence in other places, but overall Pittsburgh has been really good for us.
KATIE DRUMMOND: You mentioned AI earlier in the context of Silicon Valley fads. Back in 2025 you sent an internal memo saying Duolingo would shift to be “AI-first”—that AI wouldn’t just be for boosting productivity, it would help you get closer to your mission. That memo was posted to your LinkedIn, and the public reaction was pretty scathing. A lot of people joked that AI should
