No Stupid Questions 5. What Do Tom Sawyer and the Founder of Duolingo Have in Common?
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Jan 19, 2025 
Luis von Ahn, the innovative mind behind CAPTCHA and CEO of Duolingo, shares insights from his journey from Guatemala to developing a leading language-learning app. He draws a whimsical comparison between engaging tasks and Tom Sawyer's cleverness in making chores fun. The conversation delves into the social benefits of language learning and the challenges facing the translation industry. Von Ahn also discusses Duolingo's mission for free education and its unique monetization strategies, offering a glimpse into the evolving landscape of academia and tech.
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Tom Sawyer Analogy
- Luis von Ahn's work with CAPTCHA and Duolingo is compared to Tom Sawyer's fence-painting scheme.
- Both ingeniously incentivized others to perform tasks beneficial to themselves.
CAPTCHA's Origin
- Luis von Ahn co-created CAPTCHA to address Yahoo's spam account problem.
- Distorted text images, easily readable by humans but not computers, were used to differentiate them.
CAPTCHA and Book Digitization
- Luis von Ahn's CAPTCHA was used to digitize books by presenting unrecognizable words to users.
- This crowdsourced digitization effort helped Google Books and other archives.