Luis Von ahn arellano

“You know I was feeling good. I thought, okay, well, we can continue raising money for a while. I don't need to figure out how to make money. We can just continue raising money for a while. And the partner from that firm sat me down and she said, 'You know, you're not going to find a bigger fool. We're the biggest fool....”

— From reCAPTCHA and Duolingo: Luis von Ahn (2020), DeepSignal Studios (May 01, 2020)

“And the thinking really was there's all these people that I grew up with in Guatemala, very poor. 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 happened, at least, you know, i...”

— From reCAPTCHA and Duolingo: Luis von Ahn (2020), DeepSignal Studios (May 01, 2020)

“AI is not going to take your job. Somebody using AI is going to take your job.”

— From Duolingo CEO Reveals The Future of Jobs & AI in 2026, Prime Insight Podcast (May 01, 2026)

“We have never done a layoff despite what the internet may think. It is important to continue hiring people because a single employee is just way more productive now than they used to be.”

— From Duolingo CEO Reveals The Future of Jobs & AI in 2026, Prime Insight Podcast (May 01, 2026)

“I made a conscious shift and certainly the executive team was behind me. But we got to a point where, you know, if you look at over the last 5 years, we've grown a lot... But two things happened. One is that throughout 2025 we've been still growing but we were growing slower than we're growing in previous years... The...”

— From Duolingo CEO Reveals The Future of Jobs & AI in 2026, Prime Insight Podcast (May 01, 2026)

“I think there will still be cases where we're going to want real human translation, but there will be fewer and fewer. But I do think that for certain situations, we're going to want that premium. It's going to turn into very premium. But for most, you know, everyday uses, yeah, it's going to go away.”

— From Duolingo CEO Reveals The Future of Jobs & AI in 2026, Prime Insight Podcast (May 01, 2026)

“I think most of it is going to be transformed. And I think what will happen is that some companies, particular companies that are not growing a lot are going to find that they can do the same with fewer people. So it may not be very specific professions but it will be like do we need a 100 people doing customer service...”

— From Duolingo CEO Reveals The Future of Jobs & AI in 2026, Prime Insight Podcast (May 01, 2026)

“What's at stake for us is will it be the case that in 10 years we can get a significant fraction of humanity's population, billions of people, actually learning something, as opposed to either doom scrolling or just giving up on life because AI can do everything.”

— From Duolingo’s battle for learning in an AI world (CEO Luis von Ahn) | Rapid Response, Rapid Response and Masters of Scale (May 01, 2026)

“I did not think this was going to be controversial because internally inside Duolingo this was not controversial. We started as a technology company and you know I used to be a computer science professor that actually taught the AI class at Carnegie Mellon University. So we've always used AI in as much as we can. Inter...”

— From Duolingo’s battle for learning in an AI world (CEO Luis von Ahn) | Rapid Response, Rapid Response and Masters of Scale (May 01, 2026)

“In 2026, we decided that this year we would really spend it trying to work much more on user growth rather than revenue growth. The reason for that is I really think that over the next few years, the way most people learn is going to change. AI is just going to allow us to teach significantly better than we have in the...”

— From Duolingo’s battle for learning in an AI world (CEO Luis von Ahn) | Rapid Response, Rapid Response and Masters of Scale (May 01, 2026)

“I'm a big believer in AI but that comes with some asterisks and learnings. My initial memo said that we were going to evaluate every employee on their usage of AI. I don't think that was right. Many people came to me and said look for the job that I'm doing I'm finding that I'm just using AI for AI's sake because you'r...”

— From Duolingo’s battle for learning in an AI world (CEO Luis von Ahn) | Rapid Response, Rapid Response and Masters of Scale (May 01, 2026)

“In the short term, you know, the it really it really matters which one you're prioritizing, but I think in the long term, what's going to matter the most and what's going to also make the most money is a company that really is putting the education of the users first. I think that will be the larger company in the long...”

— From Duolingo’s battle for learning in an AI world (CEO Luis von Ahn) | Rapid Response, Rapid Response and Masters of Scale (May 01, 2026)

“DAUs grew 21% year-over-year, right in line with what we expected as we make this strategic shift. I want to spend a few minutes on what we shipped this quarter related to language learning because teaching better is the foundation of everything we're building toward.”

— From $DUOL Duolingo Q1 2026 Earnings Conference Call, EARNMOAR (May 04, 2026)

“We now offer courses up to professional proficiency, which is B2 on the CFR scale across all our nine most learned languages. And we got there fast. In Q1 alone, we published 20,500 course units. To put that in context, that's more than 10 times what we were shipping per quarter just two years ago.”

— From $DUOL Duolingo Q1 2026 Earnings Conference Call, EARNMOAR (May 04, 2026)

“We are at the same time undermonetized and overmonetized. It is a weird thing. The reality is that roughly 12% of our monthly active users are paying subscribers. We think that number should be much higher. I mean, if you look at comps of other premium models, they're much higher than that. Uh, you know, Spotify is clo...”

— From $DUOL Duolingo Q1 2026 Earnings Conference Call, EARNMOAR (May 04, 2026)