Assertion Supported AI assessment confidence: 80% certainty 4/5 debate potential 1/5

Von Ahn: Humans wasted 500,000 hours daily solving 200 million CAPTCHAs

Luis von Ahn · reCAPTCHA and Duolingo: Luis von Ahn (2020) · Dec 18, 2023 · at 20:48

Luis von Ahn, inventor of CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA, describes the calculations that prompted him to repurpose human verification effort toward digitizing printed books.

0:00 / 0:11exact quote · 11.0s
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“About two hundred million times a day somebody types a capture. And that's when you get two hundred million times a day times 10 seconds. So humanity as a whole is wasting about 500,000 hours a day typing these captchas.”

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