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 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, exposing von Ahn to learning opportunities that most local kids never saw. That, in turn, shaped his view of education in stark terms. Not as a great equalizer for society but as a force that often reinforces inequality unless someone intervenes. 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 both 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 drops 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 Guatemala, doctors are not very wealthy like they are here. I mean, my mother was a physician that worked for the state of Guatemala. So again, straight middle class, but she spent all of her extra income that was not for, you know, food, on my education.
I went to the school where basically all of the kids of the rich people go. Or like the kids of ambassadors and everything.
Even though I was not rich, I received the education of a rich person, and that made me see things differently. Everybody else in my neighborhood was not going to that school. People in my neighborhood were going to either a public school or a middle-class school. I could see the difference in what I was learning. I could see what that did in terms of opportunities that it opened up for me. In my case, I was able to come to the United States for college, et cetera.
This really changed my view in terms of what education is. A lot of people, when they talk about education, they're like, “Oh, it's the thing that can bring social classes together.” I always saw it as the opposite. I mean, generally, wealthy people can get themselves a much better education.
Absolutely.
We're sitting here in New York. People with money in New York can get a really good education.
They're spending $60,000 a year on that really good education.
It's probably worth it. People who don't have very much money, especially in poor countries, sometimes they barely just learn how to read and write. That's it. That's what they got.
So this is the reason I wanted to start Duolingo. To do something that gives education to everyone in the world. That's what we've been doing. I'm very proud that that part has come true. Today, Duolingo has more than a hundred million active users, and it really is the entire spectrum, from Syrian refugees all across Europe learning the language of the country to two very wealthy, famous people. There was a story that George Clooney uses it.
I was doing research for this podcast, and I saw that headline and was like, “Oh, I gotta read this now.”
But it's not just him, it's a lot of famous wealthy people. So very wealthy people have access to much better stuff than certainly Syrian refugees, but in this case, it's basically the same system being used by everybody. More money cannot buy you a better system. That's exactly what we wanted to do.
I'm curious, you're running a public company, and there are obviously a lot of expectations financially that come with that. How do you allow for George Clooney to have essentially the same experience as the Syrian refugee who really needs to learn English?
Ultimately, we're a very mission-driven company. We really care about this mission of developing the best education in the world and making it universally available. We really care about that. But the thing about it is that if you look at it in the long term, I'm pretty certain that that mission can also make a very big business.
At the moment we have, I don't know the exact number, 135 million active users or something. If you can get to 500 million, a billion active users, you will have a large business. Not everybody's going to pay. For example, 10 percent of our active users are paying and the other 90 percent don't pay.
So the George Clooneys are paying and maybe some others are not.
That’s right. That is still a large business. I'm perfectly fine with this. By the way, our free users, the ones that don't pay or may not pay, they'll tell their friends, and some of their friends will pay. So, we love our free users.
I'm not going to dig in on captcha with you, but as we revisit your history and your trajectory, you ultimately created reCaptcha and then you were able to sell it to Google. My understanding is that it brought in an amount of money that meant you could have just retired at a very young age. Built a beautiful house wherever you wanted and bought sports cars and did what people do when they make that kind of money at that age. You didn’t. Why?
So, in 2009 I sold this company reCaptcha to Google. I thought about just retiring.
When you thought about it, what did that look like for you? What's your utopian retirement vision?
A house on a beach, but you know what's funny? I hate sand.
So that did it, you immediately got back to work.
That was not the reason. The reason was I just thought it would be really boring.
For one reason or another, I just need to always be doing something. So I pretty quickly started working on other stuff.
And that was in 2009, so it didn't take you that long to go from there to founding this company?
No. About a year and a half.
Now my understanding is that Bill Gates once spent 45 minutes trying to convince you to work with Microsoft, and you said you wanted to, quote, “do your own thing,” which is a bold thing to say to Bill Gates. Do you think you would be a terrible employee?
I don't know if I would be a terrible employee. I just had something, a number of things, I really wanted to do. Microsoft, in particular, had this place where I was gonna go get a job, Microsoft Research, which is an amazing place, but I just really wanted to do my own thing.
I don't know if I would've been that terrible of an employee, because I'm a rule-follower. So I think I would've just followed the rules, but I feel like I'm a lot happier doing what I wanna do. It has a lot to do with education. I really want to give out education to a lot of people at this point. As I get older, I start thinking about things like, well, what's gonna be on my tombstone?
You're thinking about that already?
I am. Not that I'm gonna die tomorrow, but if I am ever remembered for something, what will it be? I would like it to be something related to education.
Can you talk a little bit about actually building and scaling this company? As a first-time CEO, going from zero to however many employees you have now, what were the ins and outs of that?
The job of a CEO has changed significantly from the beginning. I mean, when you only have two or three employees, it's a very different job than when you have a hundred employees and whatever we have now, which is close to a thousand employees. The job has changed quite a bit, so I think one of the hard parts has been continually growing with the company.
Everybody may not agree with this, but I claim that when a company is going from zero to 20 people the best thing a CEO can do is micromanage.
Just be in the weeds with all 19 of them?
Yes, and if it worked for a thousand, I would love to do it. It just stopped working after a certain point.
Sounds terrible.
At some point you kind of have to figure out why they stopped working, and then you have to evolve with it. The other thing that has been hard for me in particular is that I am by nature conflict-avoidant. That is not always compatible with being a good CEO.
Oh, I can't imagine it is.
The first person that I had to let go from Duolingo, I had to do so three times, because the first two times they did not realize that they were being fired because I sugarcoated it so much they came back the next day. Yes, this happened.
Oh no. But what happened the second time?
I can't even explain it. I also sugarcoated it the second time, and I thought I was being more firm, but I wasn't. The third time I think I was even a little mean. I was like, “You're being fired. Do you realize that?”
I've learned a few things. Particularly, if there's something that you need to tell to somebody that is hard to say, don't build up to it. Just say it. Then clean up after.
There is a kindness to direct communication.
That has taken me many years to learn. Guatemalan culture is very roundabout. I joke that in Guatemala the way to say yes is to just say “yes.” The way to say no is you say, “yeah …” That's kind of how people say no. I've had to learn to be a lot more direct.
Duolingo is headquartered in Pittsburgh. Founded there. Has always been there. Is still there. There is a tech scene in Pittsburgh, in case people aren't aware. What has it meant for the company to be based in Pittsburgh, good or bad, as opposed to being in the most obvious place that you could be?
I think early on Pittsburgh was great for us. And it still is. There's a number of reasons, but one of the reasons is that education, which is what we decided to focus on, has not been a fad. Certainly not a tech fad. One of the things that happens, particularly in Silicon Valley, is that everybody’s usually chasing fads. There's nothing wrong with that. The current fad is AI. Great. This is good. But if we want to concentrate on education, I think it has been good that we have been in a place where we just have time to develop it. It's taken us a while to develop the system that we have. But it’s been a blessing that we have been kind of left alone.
Yeah.
The other thing that Pittsburgh did is it allowed us to build an executive team that I claim was basically better than the company, because we had a number of people in the executive team that were in Pittsburgh for one reason or another: They had aging parents, they had some reason they had to be in Pittsburgh. Had they been in San Francisco, they would’ve gotten a job in a much larger company, because they had jobs at much larger companies before, but then they had to move to Pittsburgh, and then we were kind of the best game in town.
Definitely the best game in Pittsburgh.
Now, to be fair, we also have large offices in other places, including one in New York where I'm really spending more than half of my time. So yeah, it helps to have offices in other places, but I think Pittsburgh, in general, has really helped us.
Well, don't give up on Pittsburgh. I have a real soft spot for Pittsburgh.
Don’t worry.
You mentioned AI a minute ago in the context of Silicon Valley. I could ask you all sorts of things about it, because it is what so many people spend a lot of time talking about, especially if you were ever in San Francisco. But in 2025 you sent out this internal memo. You said the company would be shifting to be, quote, “AI first.” AI would not just be about productivity but about getting closer to your mission. That email is still on your LinkedIn page, and the responses are painful to read. They are scathing. As I'm sure you know, a few people suggested using AI to replace CEOs. Can you tell us a little bit about the thinking behind that memo and where it went off the rails? Because I think from a publicity point of view it certainly did. It was not the most generous round of press the company has ever received.
By the way, internally, this memo was not controversial at all. I mean, it's just kind of how we've been operating since we launched Duolingo; we decided to bet on technology. We are making a thing that teaches people, and we're doing so with technology. That has always been our belief, and we have always used AI, whatever AI was at the time. It was not large language models, but whatever AI was at the time, we've always leaned in on this. So internally, this was just not controversial.
But I really wanted everybody to understand inside the company that the latest advances in AI, large language models in particular, were something that were going to really help us teach a lot better and that we should therefore adopt it as much as possible.
I think I failed at providing enough context externally at what that really meant. A lot of people made a lot of assumptions. For example, some people thought that what that meant was that I was going to fire all of our employees. Interestingly, we've never done a layoff, which is rare for tech. In fact, last year we grew. In the year where we were being accused of having fired all our employees, we actually grew our employee base. But I think, in general, we failed to provide context.
We have this internal, we call it the Golden Rule of AI, which is we use AI to help our learners. That's it. If we can do something to help our learners by either teaching them better or by being able to write more content or something like that, then we will use AI. The goal is not to cut costs or anything like that. Sometimes we end up cutting costs, because it's actually cheaper to do certain things with AI, but that is not the goal.
What has been pretty positive with AI is there's all these things that we couldn't do before. A really good example is teaching conversation. When you're learning a new language, one of the important things you gotta learn is how to talk to other people. In the past, before AI, the only way we knew how to get people to practice conversation was to practice with another person. But it turns out, I don't know the exact number, but about 90 percent of people don't want to talk to another person in a language that they're not very comfortable with. They may tell you they want to, but the reality is they're too shy.
So even whenever we offered the chance to practice conversation with another human, people were just not using that. But when we added the ability to practice with an AI avatar, it worked. People weren’t shy about it. It really teaches conversation very well. They think that the AI is not judging them, even though the AI is judging them.
For the last few years as generative AI has been more and more and more in the conversation, I think there has been this notion of using AI to democratize access to education.
When you look at the landscape outside of Duolingo, do you feel like that promise is being seized by Silicon Valley, by the technology industry? What are you seeing?
I think there's huge promise for AI to help education.
I also want to clarify another thing that is important. This does not mean replacing teachers. I am a former teacher. I was a professor at Carnegie Mellon. That is not the aim here. As I was saying at the beginning, teachers inspire people.
I think we really can improve learning outcomes everywhere in the world with AI. So there's a huge potential here. We're not there yet. I mean, nobody is there yet. I think Duolingo is ahead of everybody else in terms of the number of people that are learning with us. For example, we really have more people learning on Duolingo than any other system, but we're still not quite there yet.
For example, our math product, we're still working on it, but I think within a couple years, my hope is that it'll be a really good after-school thing that if you're struggling in math, you'll just be able to use Duolingo and get much better at it. But the opportunity is not yet seized.
When I talk to educators in academia, there is so much fear. There is so much anger and fear and frustration, and it’s interesting to see how the promise and potential of the technology, and what’s talked about, has by no means translated into the classroom. How do we bridge that divide?
So again, our goal really is not to substitute teachers, right? They're needed. But I think the way to bridge that divide is what we're trying to do with our math product, which is basically a supplementary after-school thing. The teacher will be able to motivate. They're gonna do an explanation, but later the AI or the app is gonna give you a lot of personalized practice.
Is there a scenario where you see AI as a competitive threat to your company?
We're very happy with the fact that AI is there, that it's allowing us to do everything. Some people talk about it as a potential competitor, because you may, for example, try to learn a language with ChatGPT or something.
Exactly, yeah.
That probably works, but the thing that we have going for us is—and this is one of the main things that I've learned over the last several years about running Duolingo—the hardest thing about teaching somebody anything is keeping them motivated. It's very slow and very hard, but you could probably learn a language by reading Wikipedia.
That sounds awful.
I know it would be awful. But you certainly can theoretically learn, I don't know, quantum mechanics, by reading Wikipedia. Like theoretically. But who does that? That's the 0.1 percent of the population that has enough desire and self-discipline. Most people, that's just not how you do things.
What we do really well with Duolingo is we keep you motivated. We keep you motivated to spend more and more time learning it. An easy-to-learn language, like Spanish for English speakers, takes like 500 hours to get to a pretty good level. So we need to motivate you to stick around for 500 hours. That's hard if you are just kind of querying ChatGPT and being like, “Now tell me how to say ‘hello.’” That's hard to do for 500 hours, and that's the thing we're really good at.
Duolingo has been in the news on and off recently because your share prices are down. You’ve talked about this. You've characterized this as being about making long-term decisions as opposed to optimizing for short-term gain. You also talked earlier in this conversation about how the company ultimately is mission-driven. Can you talk a little bit more about that? I mean, that is relatively unusual in the context of a publicly traded company.
There's a number of things. What we want—not just me, but the executive team at Duolingo, our board, and I believe most Duolingo employees—is we want to have a long-lasting impact in education and as much positive impact as we can in the world.
We also believe that in the long term that is the largest possible business we can build. If we have a billion people learning on Duolingo, that is a large business. We really want to get there. We want to get to the point where we’re actively teaching, call it a billion people.
Because of that, over the last few months, I have decided to make a number of moves. What they do is, in the short term, lower the amount of money we're making. Not by a lot, by the way. It's a relatively small amount.
Is there an example of one or two that you've made?
There are many. Let me try to explain a little, with a little more context. The way we improve Duolingo is we run close to a thousand A/B tests per quarter. An A/B test is just trying something different on some fraction of the users. So it could be as simple as changing the color of a button, and then we measure whether that does something good for us. What does something good mean? It can mean making us more money or getting people to recommend Duolingo to their friends or getting people to stick around for longer.
Some of the A/B tests that we run are to make more money. We could run an A/B test that, at the end of a lesson, gives you two ads instead of one. What that would probably do is it would make us more money. For two reasons: We can sell two ads; also, some of the people that don't wanna see ads, because now there’s two instead of one, will pay to subscribe to get rid of the ads. So we’ll make more money in two ways. But having two ads also probably scares some users away. Because it sucks.
That is not something that we’re doing. But it is an example of something that, if we were really trying to increase the amount of money we make, we would favor things like putting two ads at the end of a lesson. Over the last few months, we have stopped any kind of experiment that hurts user experience in exchange for monetization. Because for a year or two, we were doing some experiments, and the results would be something like, Oh, that whatever it was is making us $50,000 more per day, but it’s scaring away a thousand daily active users. We would take that exchange because we’re like, well, $50,000 is a lot of money per day.
We are no longer taking that exchange. If it is scaring any users, if it is driving any users away, we are no longer taking that exchange. What that has done is, it’s not that our revenue has gone down, it’s that our growth rate of revenue has basically gone down a little bit. We're growing our revenue a little slower. That doesn't mean that we're a worse business. That just means that we are building something for the long term.
How do you keep a board, investors, and shareholders happy all at the same time? You talked at the start about the challenge of being a CEO, but even just reading about these decisions that you've made and the impact, that is a dance you are doing on a daily basis.
That is true of any CEO. That is what you have to do.
But I would argue that some companies are all in on shareholder return.
I fundamentally believe that I am also all in on shareholder return, but only if you look at the span of a decade, not next quarter. I really do believe that if you are a shareholder for Duolingo and you wait a decade, the biggest possible return we can give you is if we are building a company that will try to have a billion active users as opposed to a company that will scare off all its users but kind of squeeze them for as much money as possible.
That’ll probably be a nice company, but it will not be as big as one that has a billion active users. So I claim that what I'm doing really is for our shareholders, but the ones that are thinking long term. That is the job of the CEO trying to do what’s best for everybody.
One thing that you have done, coming out of reCaptcha and Duolingo, having amassed wealth and influence, is you have a foundation that is focused on helping people in Guatemala. One of the things that it focuses on is girls’ education. Why?
I really love my country. We're trying to help as much as we can. Certainly we’re trying to help with girls’ education. Education in general is probably the biggest focus. We support a number of schools. We support all kinds of educational initiatives. We're also doing environmental conservation in Guatemala, which is quite needed. We're doing some work here in New York that is mainly done by my wife. She works in women’s rights here in New York.
For me, personally, my biggest thing, even though I love New York, my biggest thing is helping Guatemala. Education is just something I really want to do now.
In particular for girls, one of the things that ends up happening in a country like Guatemala, which is pretty common in a lot of countries, is when families have to choose who they send to school, because the kids work in the fields, et cetera, sometimes they favor the male. That's just the culture.
We’re trying to combat that. That's why we're supporting a bunch of schools that are girls-only that are doing incredible work.
In 2020, you also became a major shareholder in La Hora, a Guatemalan newspaper. Clearly not a moneymaking proposition. I work in media—I can tell you that. Why wade into journalism?
I’m a huge fan. I think it's really important for democracy. You are completely right. This is not a moneymaking situation. Our goal is to break even. That is not currently succeeding. I'm only involved monetarily. I'm not involved with any of the editorial or anything. The team is doing that. But I really wanted to support something that is helping with democracy, especially in a country like Guatemala, where historically democracy has not been our forte. Let's put it that way.
You're an immigrant, and I have no doubt Duolingo serves a disproportionate number of immigrants, given the business that you're in.
Yes, we also employ a lot of immigrants.
When you look at the landscape in the United States—we have ICE raids happening in cities across the country—what do you see, from your point of view, from your vantage point, when you look at all of that?
It's a pretty complicated topic. I'm not in favor of illegal immigration. That is just not a thing that I am. But, you know, this country was built on immigrants. We employ a lot of immigrants. So, at the moment, my main concern is that our employees feel welcome and safe. We have offices in London and Beijing, but the vast majority of our employees are in the United States. My main concern is that they are feeling welcome and safe, and that is not always the case.
I can imagine. How do you navigate that as a CEO? Again, you are answering to so many different people while also trying to protect an employee base with many immigrants. How do you handle that part of your job?
It's one of the things that I have to do. In our case, we try to provide as much support as we can. Part of the reason we have offices in Beijing and London is that sometimes we cannot get the visa for the employee here, and then they have to leave the country.
It’s 2026. You've gotten into chess, math, I think 250 programs in 42 languages. What does success look like for Duolingo moving forward? You've talked about a 10-year horizon, you've mentioned a billion users, but when you really drill down, if we talk again in a year and then we talk again in five years, what do you want to be able to tell WIRED that you did?
I really want it to be the case that we have a significant fraction of the world’s population learning meaningful things on Duolingo. I really do believe that we are a better alternative to social media. We want it to be the case that phone time is good time.
I mean, the idea of having to pull someone off of TikTok and convince them to spend time learning a language is not an easy task.
No, because it turns out some of these social media sites, or all of them, are very addictive.
Duolingo is not as fun as TikTok. It's not, but we are pretty fun. I’m hoping that some amount of self-determination, like 10 percent of self-determination, gets people to spend more and more time learning something.
We're going to do other subjects. I'm not announcing any new subjects, because the reality is we're not working on any new subjects, but I would really like to do science. Before we did chess, I kept on saying our next subject should be science, and then we did chess. Before we did music, I kept on saying our next subject is science. Then we did music. I don’t know when we’ll end up doing science, but I really want to do science as well. I think we can really make the world better if we do that.
I would love to wrap up with a very quick game, if you're up for it. We invented it, it’s called Control, Alt, Delete. I want to know what piece of technology you would love to control; what piece you would alt, so alter or change; and what you would delete. So what would you have vanquished from the Earth if given the opportunity?
I would love to control AI.
All of it?
Sure. I think it has a lot of promise, but like everybody else, I'm both excited and nervous. I'm nervous about what it could do. I think most everybody is pretty nervous. I don't know if I, personally, would like to exactly control AI, but I would like to have some amount of oversight on AI. So that it doesn't do the things I don't want it to do.
Be part of the regulatory body governing AI.
Sure. I would like to do that so that it doesn't go haywire.
That's control. Um, alt. I would like to alter social media so that it teaches you something. It's kind of what we're trying to do with Duolingo, but it's not exactly social media. You know, some of that time should be spent bettering yourself as opposed to whatever the hell it is that you're doing now.
Um, delete. People may hate me for this, but I would delete anything related to cryptocurrencies.
Anything at all.
I'm just not a fan.
Why not? That's a good one.
For the last however many, more than 15 years, there have been a lot of attempts at making good use of this technology, and the reality is we haven't really found one other than gambling with bitcoin. There's like, “Oh, we can have art with it.” No, you really can’t. There's all this stuff that we’ve tried …
Wait, are we throwing out the blockchain too?
It's fine. It's a fine thing, but if it were up to me, I would delete this and have all these people that are really smart that are trying to figure out what the next price of bitcoin is to instead be working on bettering humanity in one way or another as opposed to doing that.
So I take it you are not invested in any cryptocurrencies.
I bought like a couple hundred dollars of something a while ago, and it's probably worth like a few thousand dollars now. So, great. But I lost my password for it.
There are many, many, many, many tragic stories of that nature.
But this is not the reason why I don't like it. I'm just not a fan.
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