PRINCIPAL RESEARCHER AND AI VISIONARY / GOOGLE
Ray Kurzweil
Ray Kurzweil’s eerily prescient predictions about AI are underpinned by a simple line chart. The chart, tracking the amount of computing power you could buy for a dollar over time, has grown exponentially for the past 85 years. Kurzweil initially used it to prioritize his inventions as a young programmer, focusing on a revolutionary print-to-speech machine for the blind in the 1970s, then early speech-recognition software in the ’80s. Eventually, he started writing about what he believed advances in computing power would bring, and his predicting “took on a life of its own.”
In 1990, Kurzweil correctly projected that AI would beat the best human player at chess before the turn of the millennium, and that mobile devices connected to a global information network would emerge in the decade that followed. In 1999, he forecast that by 2029, computers would match human intelligence in every domain. At the time, leading researchers like Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio thought it would take much longer. They have since changed their tune.
Six decades into his career, Kurzweil still devotes his have become sacred texts, inspiring many now leading the field—including DeepMind co-founder Shane Legg and top researcher at Anthropic Jan Leike—to dedicate their careers to AI.
