Speaker
Ray Kurzweil
25 bits across the podcasts they've appeared on
Ray Kurzweil states that computing hardware has improved 75,000-fold over 75 years, and combined with software advances the overall computation increase is roughly a million-fold.
Kurzweil has maintained since 1999 that AGI will arrive by 2029, and predicted that debate over whether AGI has arrived would begin around 2026.
Kurzweil's predictions spanning the late 1980s through 2009 were independently evaluated and found to be 86% accurate, using a strict criterion of within one year.
Kurzweil predicts the Singularity — representing a million-fold increase in intelligence over human levels — will occur by 2045.
Kurzweil noted AI summarized an entire book and answered questions about it in 40 seconds — roughly 100 times faster than humans could do the same task.
Kurzweil stated that large language models are now about 50% better than human doctors at diagnosing illness and recommending treatment — a capability that did not exist a year ago.
Kurzweil argued that large language models have only been truly effective for the last six months, with models a year ago being largely unusable.
Kurzweil noted that individual synapses operate at roughly 200 calculations per second, but the brain achieves massive power through simultaneous parallel processing of all synapses.
Kurzweil's print-to-speech reading machine for the blind originally cost $20,000 as a large device and is now available as a free smartphone app.
At the halfway point of the Human Genome Project, less than 1% of the genome had been sequenced, causing critics to predict 200 years to completion — but the project finished on schedule because sequencing doubled each year.
