Growing up in Guatemala, Luis von Ahn had about a 50 percent chance of learning to read above the first-grade level. He credits his mother for spending most of her resources on his education, as she put him in a good school in a wealthier part of town.
But that kind of inequality — the fact that a person’s prospects of social mobility depend on their station in life — always bothered him.
“People talk about education as an equalizer, but I’ve seen how it can be a divider,” he said in an interview with Doug Rand, the Obama administration’s assistant director for entrepreneurship. “When people are rich, they can pay for an amazing education, and because they get a great education, they remain rich.”
Von Ahn is cofounder and CEO of Duolingo, the world’s largest language learning platform — which is free for most users. He is behind a number of other tech projects, including CAPTCHA, which distinguishes between humans and bots online, and reCAPTCHA, which builds on that service while helping to digitize books. The Pittsburgh-based tech entrepreneur holds multiple patents, is a consulting professor in Carnegie Mellon’s computer science department, and is known as a pioneer of crowdsourcing, which he calls “human computation.” Von Ahn was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2006 for “working at the intersection of cryptography and artificial and natural intelligence to address problems of profound theoretical and practical importance relating to internet security and functionality.”
Asked about his American dream in an NBC interview, von Ahn said it had changed since he arrived here as an 18-year-old to study math at Duke.
“At first it was just to get an education,” he said. “At this point it’s to have a real impact in the world, and I think I’m working towards that.”
