Luis von Ahn quotes:

I definitely play some games, like Nintendo D.S. or the Wii, and some computer games.

I watch a lot of TV. That's how I spend most of my time outside of work. If I had more time, I would fill it 100 percent with watching TV.

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.

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.

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?

In 2011, after spending a couple of years working at Google, I decided that I wanted to dedicate myself to helping to transform education. I was particularly inspired by my upbringing in Guatemala, a poor country where high-quality educational opportunities are limited to those who have money.

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.

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.

I finished reading High Output Management by Andrew Grove, which had such valuable insights for leaders that I've been forcing managers at Duolingo to read the book.

Basically, I want to make all of humanity more efficient by exploiting the human cycles that get wasted.

I am always able to keep a laser focus on one thing at a time without getting distracted. It helps that I try to break everything I do into small, achievable tasks.

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.

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.

As humanity goes online, it's becoming an extremely advanced, large-scale processing unit.

People are good at figuring out what's attractive, and computers are good at quickly searching and finding. You put them together, and bang!

Because education is such a broad area, I chose to focus on language learning.

One fact we're particularly proud of is that there are more people learning languages on Duolingo in the US than there are people learning languages in the entire US public school system.

This sounds strange to many people, but I work out for exactly 16 minutes every day, and do so at maximum speed by running 2.5 miles. This keeps me healthy without taking up too much time so I can stay focused on other things. It's one of the most efficient things I do each day.

My ultimate research goal is to transform our human existence to just eating, sleeping, drinking, playing - nevermind.

[Captchas] are not only annoying, but they kill 10 seconds of your time.

I am an early riser, and always wake up between 5 and 6am.

The question that motivates my research is, if we can put a man on the Moon with 100,000 [people], what can we do with 100 million?

Every time you buy tickets on Ticketmaster, you help to digitize a book.

I co-founded Duolingo with the mission of bringing free language education to the world.

I usually make to-do lists with timelines, and pen and paper does the trick for me.

I worked on a number of projects that were used by millions of people and that also served as inspiration to what we now call "crowd-sourcing."

If you get asked to do something that would take place down the road (say you get asked to speak at a conference that's a year away) and you wouldn't want to do it if it were taking place next week, then don't do it. This advice has helped me evaluate the opportunities that I truly want to dedicate my time to and those that I don't.

It's hard to think of a time when I'm not working, but when that is the case, I like to travel and eat good food.

Together with my advisor, Manuel Blum, I co-invented CAPTCHAs, or computer-generated tests that humans are routinely able to pass but that computers have not mastered (they are the squiggly computer letters that are prevalent across the web).

Before the Internet, coordinating more than 100,000 people, let alone paying them, was essentially impossible. But now with the Internet, I've just shown you a project where we've gotten 750 million people to help us digitize human knowledge.