NBC Nightly News with Tom Llamas - American Dreaming with José Díaz-Balart: Luis von Ahn

Episode Date: October 27, 2020

Luis von Ahn is the genius behind CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA, which was sold to Google in 2009, and also the founder and CEO of Duolingo, the world's most popular language-learning platform. Born and raised in Guatemala, von Ahn saw firsthand that high-quality educational opportunities were limited to those who could afford it. Inspired to fix this, he created Duolingo to make language education free and accessible to everyone. von Ahn says he’s achieved his American Dream and is now working toward making an impact on worldwide education.

Luis, talk to me about your American dream. My dream has been, well, it has switched. I mean, at first it was just to get an education. At this point, it's to have a real impact in the world. Luis Bonan, what a pleasure seeing you. Pleasure being here. Pleasure talking to you again. Luis, you are responsible in no small part for part of something which for many of us really is frustrating when we're online. And yet it's something that has really been revolutionary and has been so helpful.

Talk about CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA. I mean, if people haven't seen this, it's these distorted characters that you have to type all over the Internet. Whenever you're buying tickets on Ticketmaster or getting an account on Facebook, sometimes you're asked to type these distorted characters. I invented that. That thing is called a CAPTCHA. And the reason it's there is to make sure that you are actually a human

and not a computer program that was written to submit that form. And so how did you come up with this? And what did you do with it? Because I know that you did CAPTCHA and then reCAPTCHA, which you later sold to Google. Well, this started in the year 2000. It all started, I was a first year PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University.

And I went to a talk by a guy who at the time was the chief scientist of Yahoo. Now, you got to understand in the year 2000, Yahoo was the biggest internet company that there was. And he talked about a problem that they didn't know how to solve, which was there were people who were writing programs to obtain millions of email accounts from Yahoo. And they didn't know how to stop that. And then I went home, I thought about it, I talked to my PhD advisor, and we both came up with the solution, which is a test that can distinguish whether the thing that's getting an account is a human or a computer program. A single human just cannot get a million accounts. They get bored after, you know, after 30. So we came up with this test.

And the idea is the test is just we present these distorted characters. It turns out humans can read them better than computers. So that's how we know that you're a human if you can read those. We gave that away to Yahoo for free at the time. I was very young, and it didn't really even occur to us to try to make money off of that. Then a few years passed, and pretty much every website started using it. And every time that I would go to a party or something, people would ask me what I did. And I would tell them that I invented that. They immediately hated me and I apologized. And then I did a little back of the envelope calculation that approximately 200 million captures were typed by people around the world

every day. At first, I was very proud of myself. I thought, look at the impact that my work has had. But then I remembered a lot of people really hate these. And not only that, each time you want to, you do one of these, you waste about 10 seconds of your time. And if you multiply 10 seconds by 200 million, you get that humanity as a whole is wasting like 500,000 hours every day typing these annoying captures. So I thought, okay, can we do something good with that time? See, during those 10 seconds, while you're typing a capture, your brain is doing something amazing. Your brain is doing something that computers cannot yet do. And this is when it occurred to me that this is where reCaptcha

came is this second go around. It occurred to me that while you're typing a captcha, we could actually get you to help us digitize books. Back then, there was many companies, Google was probably the biggest one, that were trying to digitize all of the world's books. And so what we started doing is we started taking all of the words that the computer could not recognize in the book digitization process. And we started sending them to people around the world while they were typing a captcha. So whenever you type the captcha, those words that you were typing were words that were directly coming from a book that was being digitized that the computer could not recognize. And so we were using what people were doing to help us digitize books.

So I became a company, and then it was, you know, at the height of it, it was digitizing approximately 2 million books a year. And Google bought it for their book digitization process, and now Google still owns it. And so that was, we made something good out of something very annoying. You pretty much could have retired.

You were set. And yet, you immediately embarked on a new project. I did. And it's what I'm still working on. This was nine years ago. I started working on this project called Duolingo, which is a way to learn languages. It's by now the most popular way to learn languages in the world. And yeah.

300 million people that are using Duolingo? Yes, there are more people learning languages on Duolingo in the United States than there are people learning languages in the whole US public school system. Historically, when you wanted to learn another language, you would buy $500, $1,500 programs that you could use to learn that language. How much does it cost someone to learn another language from A to Z full through Duolingo? When I started Duolingo, I was in this very fortunate position in my life that I had just sold my previous company to Google. And I wanted to do something that was related to education.

But my views on education are very related to the fact that I'm from Guatemala. I was born there. And it's a very poor country. And a lot of people talk about education as something that brings equality to different social classes. But I always saw it as the opposite, as something that brings inequality. Because what happens in practice, particularly in poor countries, is that people who have a lot of money can buy themselves the best education in the world and therefore continue having a lot of money, whereas people who don't have very much money barely learn how to read and write. So I wanted to do something that would give equal access to education to everybody. But education is very general, so I decided to concentrate on teaching

one thing, which is languages. And in particular, languages were very interesting because particularly knowledge of English can really transform people's lives. So I thought, okay, let's make a way to teach languages that was entirely for free. And so we did that. And so when we launched Duolingo, it was first a website, then an app where you can just learn languages entirely for free.

Now, of course, we have to find a way to make money. And so we do make money to sustain the whole operation. But the way that we make money is that you can use it entirely for free, but at the end of some lessons, you have to see an ad. And so what's happening today is 97% of our users don't pay us, they just learn for free, and 3% of our users do pay us. But fortunately, we have so many users that even though only 3% of our users pay us, this year Duolingo is going to make approximately approximately somewhere between $180 and $200 million. It was recently valued at $1.5 billion. Is that what I read?

It was recently valued at $1.5 billion, yeah, last year. Luis, growing up in Guatemala, your parents worked in the candy world, right? Growing up, were you someone who was thinking about mathematical equations as a kid in Guatemala? Very early on, I was not. So my mother's family owned the candy factory. I would go play in there during the weekend. So I would actually sneak in.

So it's a candy factory. They had large machines that produced a lot of candy very fast. During the weekends, they didn't work, so it was closed. But I would sneak in. At first, I would just kind of play in there with maybe some of my cousins, and we would do hide-and-seek. Eventually, I started trying to figure out how the machines worked because it was actually fascinating.

Watching some of these machines work is fascinating because they start with basically a watery mix of something, kind of like a liquid. And then they end with a wrapped hard candy. And so they just kind of do all this stuff. And so I started trying to figure out how they work. At some point at age maybe 10 or so, I started trying to take them apart. And for a while, I was just taking little pieces of them apart and then putting them back. But then I started taking them apart more and more.

You can't show your mother-in-law. Oh, no, nobody liked that. And at some point, I got banned from going there. They're like, you can't do that anymore. Because many times I would take them apart. And then the usual, you would put them back together. But some pieces were missing or you had some extra pieces. This happened to me a lot.

And so, yeah, I got banned from going there. So that was a big part of my education, I think. I mean, I basically got a really good understanding of how some machines work. And I think the other big part was when I was eight years old, I wanted a Nintendo and my mother did not buy me a Nintendo. Instead,, I wanted a Nintendo. And my mother did not buy me a Nintendo. Instead, she bought me a computer.

And I was very upset at her because all my friends had a Nintendo. And I didn't have a Nintendo. I had this thing that was a computer. And she said, I've heard you can play games with this. And I said, OK. But, of course, she didn't know how to use a computer. To this day, my mother still doesn't know how to use by my, she didn't know how to use a computer. To this day, my mother still doesn't know how to use a computer. She didn't know how to use a computer.

She just gave it to me and I lived just with her. It was just the two of us. And so I didn't know how to figure it out, but she got me the manual for it. So I kind of just read the manual and eventually I figured out how to play games with it.

And I think that really forced me. Back then also computers were much harder to use. So that's probably what forced me to start getting into computers, at least. I think, in retrospect, this was a very good idea on my mother. But at the time, I was very upset at her. Luis, would you say that your experience growing up in Guatemala really kind of made you who you are? I am who I am entirely because of where I'm from.

I would not be working on language education if I had been born here in the United States, most likely, because, I mean, for me, having learned English completely transformed my life. You know, Guatemala City, you know, I love it, of course. I'm from there, and there's always the childhood dreams, but Guatemala City is a city where you can be in a mansion and drive half a mile, and you are in one of the poorest neighborhoods in all of Latin America.

So it is impossible to ignore. I happened to go, I mean, bless my mother. Basically, my mother spent all her resources on my education. So what that meant is I went to the best school in Guatemala City, which of course, meant that's where that's where the very rich kids went, I was not one of them. And it was very clear. I mean, there were people who were there with, with body guards, and who would get the kids with bodyguards because

their families were so wealthy. you you could see this huge disparity even inside the school and some of some of them were my friends some of the very lower income kids were my friends and i remember distinctly one of them oftentimes was not going to have dinner that night but i mean this was just this striking thing i mean to say in the same school you were you had this person who are multiple people, who were not going to have dinner tonight. And then on the other end, these people who probably for the weekend had taken their private jet to Miami. And so this, I think that's one of the biggest problems in the world. And we're actually, we're seeing it today in the United States.

I think socioeconomic disparity is a huge problem. I think it's one of the biggest problems in the world. And education really can change someone, but also change that family for generations. Just education. Yes. You know, right now we've been mainly teaching languages with Duolingo. We're starting to teach other things. For example, we just launched a new app called Duolingo ABC. And what it does is it teaches young kids how to

read. I'm not all that interested in teaching kids in the United States to learn how to read because mostly they'll learn how to read. But I am very interested in poorer countries like Guatemala, a significant fraction of people in Guatemala, or countries like Guatemala, never really learned how to read, or if they do learn how to read, they don't learn how to read very well. And that is kind of one of the first few things that holds people back. But if you, when you reach the fourth grade in primary education, you cannot read very well for the rest of your life. You basically, your education is gone. Like you just, you just will never learn all that much. So I'm

trying to make it so that we can have a free way for everybody to learn a language in the world. I mean, we're just getting started with this. But really the goal is to make a dent in worldwide illiteracy rates. Right now it's geared at kids, ages 3 to 6,

that they like it, they feel like they're playing a game. But as they're playing a game, they're learning how to read. And that's the idea. When you look down the road five or ten years, are there things that you see that down the road could be as revolutionary as Duolingo was for language or, you know, the internet was for communication. Education in general, not just with languages, but education in general is going to have a

humongous change over the next few years. We're already seeing it with COVID. A significant fraction of the world's children are now being educated online. But I think over the next few years, we're going to get our act together in terms of online education. And I think we're going to see a humongous shift of, obviously, kids are still going to go to school. But I think we're going to see a lot more stuff that gets done at home by either a teacher done through a, you know, like a Zoom call or something, or with a program that actually teaches. There are many things that probably can be taught better by a program than by a teacher. Not everything. I think teachers are extremely valuable. Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to

get rid of teachers. You're a teacher yourself. I am a teacher myself. So I'm not trying to get rid of teachers at all. But there are certain things that just the computer can just do a better job. The reason is because the computer can give you personalized attention and also doesn't get bored by watching you do the same exercise over and over and over and over again, which there are some things that that's just how you learn how to do. What is your dream? You know, my dream is to be able to say now my dream is to be able to say that I had a real impact in worldwide education. You know, one of the things that makes me the proudest with Duolingo, at some point, this happened maybe a few years ago, three, three or four years ago. We found out that Duolingo was being used by a lot of Syrian refugees all throughout Europe to learn the native language of the country that they had moved to. So, for example, Syrian refugees in Sweden were learning Swedish with Duolingo because it's free.

It made me a lot really proud. But what made me even prouder is that same week, I found out that Bill Gates was using Duolingo. And to me, the fact that these two types of people, I mean, Syrian refugees are some of the poorest people in the world. They have nothing to their name. And Bill Gates, who at the time was the richest person in the world, now is number two. The fact that they were using the same system to learn a language really tells you more money cannot buy you a better education. So that's the type of stuff that makes me really proud. Luis, talk to me about your American dream. Well, I came to the United States when I was for college. I came to the United States for college. And the reason I came, it's a funny reason. I came because I wanted to study

math. And there was not a great way to study math in Guatemala. Pretty quickly, I realized this was just a very different country where there was so much more social mobility. I mean, had I stayed in Guatemala, I just could not have accomplished what I was able to accomplish here. And so my dream has been, well, it has switched. I mean, at first it was just to get an education. At this point, it's to have a real impact in the world. And I think, yeah, I'm working towards that. Luis, thank you very much.

It's been fascinating to speak with you. These four years have gone by since we last spoke, and I learn something from you every single time. Much admiration to you, Luis. Thank you. Thank you, Jose. And as always, amazing to talk to you.