No Stupid Questions 5. What Do Tom Sawyer and the Founder of Duolingo Have in Common?
4 snips
Jun 15, 2020 
In this episode, special guest Luis von Ahn, a brilliant computer scientist and the mind behind Duolingo and CAPTCHA, shares his fascinating journey from Guatemala to tech innovator. He discusses the inventive nature of both Tom Sawyer and his entrepreneurial spirit, illustrating how creativity can solve real problems. The conversation dives into the power of language learning, its impact on income disparities, and the importance of making education accessible. Lastly, they tackle the dilemmas in academic publishing, emphasizing the quest for quality over mere quantity in research.
AI Snips
Chapters
Transcript
Episode notes
Tom Sawyer Approach
- Luis von Ahn's companies, like Tom Sawyer's fence-painting scheme, cleverly incentivize people to work without realizing it.
- They digitized books by using CAPTCHAs, getting users to decipher words computers couldn't read while accessing websites.
CAPTCHA and Book Digitization
- Luis von Ahn helped create CAPTCHAs to solve Yahoo's problem of spammers creating millions of free email accounts.
- This led to the idea of using CAPTCHAs to digitize books by having users decipher words computers couldn't recognize.
Unwitting Contributions
- Many people unknowingly contributed to digitizing books while solving CAPTCHAs.
- There was a button to explain this, but most people didn't click it.