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Ray Kurzweil Says He’ll Get ‘Unlimited Resources’ to Work on AI at Google

92 points by iProject 14y ago

ebbv 14y ago
This strikes me as an exceedingly poor investment. Granted it's an area he's almost religiously devoted to but I have seen no evidence whatsoever of any kind of RESULTS from him in this field. If it were me choosing who to fund, I would make my main criteria who has actually made some progress, has solid models that show promise and not base it on who's the most willing to make tons of unfounded predictions.
- freshhawk 14y ago
  But since it's not my money I'm interested to see what comes from this. It'll probably be interesting even though it certainly won't be anything like what he's constantly promising.
  - Keyframe 14y ago
    I'd be more than happy with "just" better speech to text. Solutions for that problem is abysmal, especially for non-english languages.
    - freshhawk 14y ago
      In terms of the single thing that could work better that would make the largest number of my "cool ideas" possible I completely agree. That would be fantastic. I think the focus away from training these systems for your own voice is probably a bad direction but I'm not an expert in this stuff.
- michaelochurch 14y ago
  From Wikipedia: Ray was the principal inventor of the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer[citation needed], the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition.
  - tbatterii 14y ago
    yeah but... what has he done for me lately? /jokes
  - mtgx 14y ago
    I think a lot of people just think of Ray Kurzweil as being like a "tech blogger" of the scientific community - someone who just likes to talk about future stuff, but not someone who's actually an inventor - which he is.
  - fchollet 14y ago
    It's important to note that none of these achievements are AI-related (apart from character recognition, but that's a terribly shallow form of AI). What's more, none of these are particularly impressive from a technology point of view, what's interesting are just the product ideas.
    - michaelochurch 14y ago
      People who have the autonomy and backing to do "real AI" and have those kinds of achievements don't change jobs often. If someone has real accomplishments in AI, that person's going to be very hard to hire away, because quality jobs are rare. For all the hullabaloo, Director isn't that high at Google. He's not being hired as a VP (there are hundreds of those) or Google Fellow. It's not a bad gig, and I'm sure he'll get to work on interesting stuff, but I would have imagined a guy of his caliber getting more.
    - CptCodeMonkey 14y ago
      > none of these are particularly impressive from a technology point of view It's the "first" part that somewhat matters more and then it become's a question of whether he's more Edison or Tesla ( crazy marketing or crazy smart). Also he's been put into a Director role, so his technical merits come second to his ability to find, understand, and cultivate the smart people needed for his department's goals.
      - waterlesscloud 14y ago
- rohern 14y ago
  I tend to agree with you. I am not aware of any major contributions he has made to AI and his recent work on the human brain is shallow and unscientific. However, Google is not dumb. They have Peter Norvig heading Google X and a team of AI engineers recruited by Norvig. Perhaps Kurzweil is just the hand guiding the ship, but not the one pulling the oars?
  - taligent 14y ago
    > However, Google is not dumb. They did buy Motorola Mobility.
    - Lost_BiomedE 14y ago
      Well, in the 'they did for the patents' defense, it is hard to quantify the value there. We also need to wait and see if they have more plans for it. Google buying youtube was considered dumb until quite recently.
  - iandanforth 14y ago
    Norvig is a very very smart guy, however he wrote the textbook on a period of AI that is very far removed from the biologically inspired machine learning techniques (Hinton, Hawkins) that I would classify as cutting edge and 'most likely to succeed.' His decision to work with Hinton lately I think is a testament to his intelligence. Kurzweil has recognized the value of Hawkins' ideas and based his latest book on them, though I and others (http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/11/ray-kurzweils-dubious-new-theory-of-mind.html http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/11/ray-kurz...) don't think he did a great job on it. Full Disclosure: I work at Numenta (Hawkins company) but these opinions are my own.
    - jimbokun 14y ago
      From the New Yorker article: Even more disappointing is the fact that Kurzweil never bothers to do what any scientist, especially one trained in computer science, would immediately want to do, which is to build a computer model that instantiated his theory, and then compare the predictions of the model with real human behavior. This is quite damning, if true, and reconciles the apparent discrepancy in this discussion between "Kurzweil, brilliant inventor" and "Kurzweil, futurist hack." Is it possible that Kurzweil, at some point, stopped being an implementer of ideas and became a pure pontificater?
- dj2stein9 14y ago
  Agreed. I think this hire by Google is largely for PR. If Google was very serious about A.I. I think they would have just acquired Jeff Hawkins' Numenta and his neuroscience crew, who have real, practical "brain-building" experience.
  - toomuchtodo 14y ago
    Give it time. It took them a bit to hire the Stanford team who won the DARPA self-driving vehicle contest after it was done.
  - rst 14y ago
    That assumes that Numenta's principals would have been willing to sell. You can't take that for granted.
- rpm4321 14y ago
  God damn it... Not this again. =================MY PREVIOUS POSTS================= I don't think that's a very fair assessment of Kurzweil's role in technology. He was on the ground, getting his hands dirty with the first commercial applications of AI. He made quite a bit of money selling his various companies and technologies, and was awarded the presidential Medal of Technology from Clinton. As I was growing up, there was a series of "Oh wow!" moments I had, associated with computers and the seemingly sci-fi things they were now capable of. "Oh wow, computers can read printed documents and recognize the characters!" "Oh wow, computers can read written text aloud!" "Oh wow, computers can recognize speech!" "Oh wow, computer synthesizers can sound just like pianos now!" I didn't realize until much later that Kurzweil was heavily involved with all of those breakthroughs. =========================================== In addition, I'd rank Minsky, Larry Page, Bill Gates, Dean Kamen, Peter, Norvig, Rafael Reif, Tomaso Poggio, Dileep George, and Kurzweil's other supporters as much more qualified to judge the merits of his ideas, than Kurzweil's detractors like Hofstadter, Kevin Kelly, Mitch Kapor, and Gary Marcus. It seems that Hofstadter is the only one of that group who is really qualified to render a verdict. http://howtocreateamind.com/ http://howtocreateamind.com/ ===================================== Here's Peter Norvig himself on Kurzweil: “Ray’s contributions to science and technology, through research in character and speech recognition and machine learning, have led to technological achievements that have had an enormous impact on society – such as the Kurzweil Reading Machine, used by Stevie Wonder and others to have print read aloud. We appreciate his ambitious, long-term thinking, and we think his approach to problem-solving will be incredibly valuable to projects we’re working on at Google.” and him effusively praising Ray at a Google Talks event: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zihTWh5i2C4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zihTWh5i2C4 - @1:25
  - foobarqux 14y ago
    What does it mean to say that Kurzweil was "heavily involved" in those breakthroughs? Did he contribute in a significant way to the science? Did he commercialize pre-existing ideas from academia?
    - joe_the_user 14y ago
      As founder of Kurzweil Computer Products, Inc, Select College Consulting Program, Medical Learning Company, etc., one would assume he was some combination of visionary, manager and (very occasionally) programmer. You assume he will be something similar at Google. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil
- Florin_Andrei 14y ago
  > This strikes me as an exceedingly poor investment. Granted it's an area he's almost religiously devoted to but I have seen no evidence whatsoever of any kind of RESULTS from him in this field. Sounds like investors talking about Columbus in 1491.
- varelse 14y ago
  If you haven't seen any evidence of results from him, then you haven't actually been looking. Because his results speak volumes. For example, the Kurzweil K2000 synthesizer illustrates exactly how he approaches problem solving - brute force - 64 MB of memory in 1991, utterly wretched price/performance ratio but awesome performance if considered on that dimension alone. And the above is 100% consistent IMO with google's approach to solving problems - throw hundreds of thousands of computers at it. He should make an excellent cultural fit. Because today's ridiculous brute force is tomorrow's low-end cell phone.
michaelochurch 14y ago
I know of a cool way he could test the unlimitedness of his resources.
- georgemcbay 14y ago
  ... he could buy a Nexus 4 on Google Play and try to get support for it from a real live person?
  - ChrisClark 14y ago
    I bought a Nexus 4 and phoned up phone support to ask about the shipping. I was immediately connected to a live person, I was told when it shipped and when I would expect it. Love the phone, totally worth it.
  - UnFleshedOne 14y ago
    Just being able to buy a nexus 4 on google play would be impressive on its own...
mej10 14y ago
Google scares me more than other companies because of their handle on AI. I wish they at least appeared to take existential risk around AI seriously. Having Kurzweil near the top isn't exactly comforting, either.
- fudged71 14y ago
  Are there any indications that they are not taking AI risks seriously?
  - mej10 14y ago
    To my knowledge they haven't published anything around AI risk or released any statements/positions publicly. That doesn't mean that they aren't taking it seriously, but it is at least a strong signal to me.
    - fudged71 14y ago
      Best I can find: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/july-dec02/google_11-29.html http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/july-dec02/google_11... SPENCER MICHELS: Sergay Brin thinks the ultimate search engine would be something like the computer named Hal in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. SERGEY BRIN: Hal could... had a lot of information, could piece it together, could rationalize it. Now, hopefully, it would never... it would never have a bug like Hal did where he killed the occupants of the space ship. But that's what we're striving for, and I think we've made it a part of the way there.
      - nova 14y ago
        Funny, because Hal didn't had a bug. It did what it did interpreting the orders that humans gave it. Just unintended consequences. Which is kinda the point about AI safety. We don't really know what we want, we sure as hell don't know how to formalize it, and we're lucky that we don't know how to create a real AI because otherwise it could surprise us in a very ugly way, just lawfully following the plan we gave it.
      - 14y ago
toddh 14y ago
Not to mention if anyone will have the resources to create and host the singularity, it would be Google.
finisterre 14y ago
I doubt that Kurzweil has truly been granted "unlimited" access to Google's resources. His title of "director of engineering" sounds impressive, but there's so far little indication he will be a very senior figure at the company.
- danielweber 14y ago
  Yeah, is he allowed to hire absolutely anyone he wants? Google has billions in the bank and can afford to be silly for quite some time, but probably not unlimited silly.
- astrodust 14y ago
  Considering the resources given to something as standard as a team working on a better search algorithm, which is thousands of servers, I'm pretty sure he's going to have access to pretty much whatever he wants. A petabyte of memory? Two hundred thousand cores? Done and done.
ldargin 14y ago
This looks like a lot of "20% time", concentrated in one person.
noonespecial 14y ago
The problem with giving truly gifted inventors all the resources they want is that they often end up inventing Segways. The kind of desperate, burning passion that Wozniak had when inventing the Apple computer doesn't seem to be something that any established company has ever been able to intentionally recreate.
- Lost_BiomedE 14y ago
  Segway and all that Bell Labs stuff...
  - Aco- 14y ago
    I can't upvote this hard enough
  - noonespecial 14y ago
    That actually is a good point. The thought crossed my mind while I wrote the above followed instantly with "well Bell labs, and to some extent IBM in the early days was different." I can't quite put my finger on why. Some sort of constrained, institutionalized invention in which a culture of talented but not "rockstar" inventors were allowed to simply sit around and try to impress each other (this was probably somewhat accidental), but at the same time were expected to be generating innovations and filing patents (this was the intentional part). There was a fairly lively discussion (either here or on slashdot) a few years ago about whether or not Google with its 20% rule could be the next Bell Labs. Driverless cars and Goolge glasses are cool, but it wasn't quite the landslide of cool everyone was hoping back then. It might just come down to the difference between "create a world changing technology for us, cost is no object" and "go work on whatever you think is cool, and don't worry about the bills".
jinushaun 14y ago
More proof that Google is SkyNet.
benth 14y ago
His resources will grow exponentially!
jrogers65 14y ago
>Google already has goldmine of info about us; knows where we are, interests, friends, reads our mails before we do. What if it understands? I do not think that I am alone when I say "please, for the love of god, don't let this happen."
- Gmo 14y ago
  No, you're not alone, that's why I try to put my eggs in several baskets, some of them being my own.
mark_l_watson 14y ago
I appreciate the comments from sceptics, but I look forward to seeing what progress they make. I hope to see a lot of progress using deep neural networks, HMMs, etc. I remember bringing a bumper sticker "AI, it's for Real" home from the 1982 AAAI conference and putting it on my car, so I may a little biased.
- astrodust 14y ago
  The number of cores Google has in their server farms is such a large number you need to use exponential notation. To say it's an AI researcher's paradise is putting it mildly.
SiVal 14y ago
I hope he'll use some of those resources to upload existing intelligences such as, oh, me. Of course, then I might end up in Google Drive or maybe a low-rated app in the Google app store....
bitwize 14y ago
This has got to be some kind of gag. Kurzweil is such a known kook that hiring him to work on AI is like hiring William Shatner to collaborate on your music project: the only possible way it could be legitimate is in an ironic sense.
- pjscott 14y ago
  Kurzweil did a lot of good work on AI a while back; he came by his fame legitimately, as an engineer and startup founder. If he had then kept his mouth shut about his predictions for the future, nobody would find his hiring at Google particularly surprising. (Don't believe me? Google it.)
wololo 14y ago
question for you: how does Kurzweil's role in Google compare to Regina Dugan's?
Tycho 14y ago
sorry to be off topic, but the article used this word 'breathless.' I've noticed this word constantly appearing since about 18 months ago. Prior to that, I don't think I encountered it much except in reference to The Corrs' pop hit Breathless (which drew heavily on an 80s Belinda Carlisle track). Am I the only one puzzled by its sudden surgence? Sidenote: weird how 'surgence' isn't a word in the dictionary
johnohara 14y ago
The detractors are few when the discussion is about IBM's Watson. It "competed against" the best Jeopardy players and is now said to be "going to medical school." http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/30/i-b-m-s-watson-goes-to-medical-school/ http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/30/i-b-m-s-watson-goes... But it's still a machine. Albeit with very sophisticated and very useful capabilities. And as far as I know, has not expressed self-awareness. Yet given the fundamental nature of how Watson works it would seem logical to think that Google might one day have to compete with IBM in a number of areas where Watson excels -- medical diagnosis for example. Or worldwide financial analysis. To do so, Google will need strong voice recognition and text-to-speech capabilities which Ray Kurzweil can help with immediately.
- yid 14y ago
  My hunch is that voice recognition and text-to-speech are the least of the concerns that Kurzweil will be dealing with. My guess is that his insights would be more applied to semantic reasoning using massive datasets (i.e., the Web), to build the engine that does the reasoning and answering rather than just the input/output layer.
varelse 14y ago
I'll enjoy the ensuing hilarity within google if "Unlimited Resources(tm)" leads to a request for a datacenter full of GPUs... Just sayin'...
hexagonc 14y ago
I think that the Kurzweil skeptics are focusing entirely on the wrong thing when they criticize Kurzweil's technical chops. He isn't being hired as an engineer; he's going to be Director of Engineering. If any of his ideas or proposals are fanciful, there are plenty of people, including Peter Norvig, to set him straight. What is noteworthy about this hiring is that for the first time, a company with serious technical ability and resources is going to be tackling strong AI. No, there was nothing in the announcement that directly mentions strong AI but I contend that they will have to tackle at least certain aspects of strong AI in order to make significant progress in speech recognition. You can only get so far using the standard tricks that are used with traditional natural language understanding (NLU). At some point, the system is going to have to have an abstract model of the way the world works in order to mimic the assumptions that human intelligence requires in order to understand language. This shouldn't be all that surprising given what they are trying to do with Google Now. Google Now is different from other products using speech recognition because it is active; it behaves more like an independent AI agent. Think about what Google will have to do to improve its performance; it will need to build a model the user's behavior in order to tune the probability distributions that underlie the best interpretations for what someone is searching for. You see, language understanding in humans sits upon a sizable foundation of innate assumptions about the way the world, including other humans, works. My claim is that Google have to duplicate much of this in order to get better technical performance from Google Now as well as search. It will need to have a prior knowledge about people in general and modify that knowledge over time by what it learns about a particular user. What I have just described is the missing component in efforts to develop strong AI -- the mechanism by which a distributed AI can learn to mimic aspects of human thinking via evolution. (I'm a functionalist, as you've probably gleaned already, so I would argue that the only way to improve NLU is to ground the processing in "real" understanding on some level.) Now, Canonical could build a Google Now type system for their Ubuntu phones and seed the learning algorithms with an open source, wiki-AI type project -- you don't need Google to create such a system. But Google has the monetary incentive, resources, and now the technical vision (Kurzweil) to justify pursuing this on a large scale, just as they did with their search engine. What was the primary thing that Apple did to reach their current level of success? They tried things that other people poo-pooed. It wasn't that the iPhone and the iPad were technically that amazing -- that's why people are unimpressed with the quality of the patents Apple has asserted -- it's that they were the first to seriously try a lot of the features that are now standard. As is often said around here, 90% of success is showing up. The company I work for directly competes with Google in areas related to Google Now and I tell you I got a little nervous when I heard they had hired Kurzweil. Again, not because of his technical abilities but because now we have to worry that Google is going to come up with something totally crazy out of left field. The fact that Kurzweil is crazy is precisely why I worry.

92 points by iProject 14y ago

ebbv 14y ago

This strikes me as an exceedingly poor investment. Granted it's an area he's almost religiously devoted to but I have seen no evidence whatsoever of any kind of RESULTS from him in this field. If it were me choosing who to fund, I would make my main criteria who has actually made some progress, has solid models that show promise and not base it on who's the most willing to make tons of unfounded predictions.

freshhawk 14y ago
But since it's not my money I'm interested to see what comes from this. It'll probably be interesting even though it certainly won't be anything like what he's constantly promising.
- Keyframe 14y ago
  I'd be more than happy with "just" better speech to text. Solutions for that problem is abysmal, especially for non-english languages.
  - freshhawk 14y ago
    In terms of the single thing that could work better that would make the largest number of my "cool ideas" possible I completely agree. That would be fantastic. I think the focus away from training these systems for your own voice is probably a bad direction but I'm not an expert in this stuff.
michaelochurch 14y ago
From Wikipedia: Ray was the principal inventor of the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer[citation needed], the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition.
- tbatterii 14y ago
  yeah but... what has he done for me lately? /jokes
- mtgx 14y ago
  I think a lot of people just think of Ray Kurzweil as being like a "tech blogger" of the scientific community - someone who just likes to talk about future stuff, but not someone who's actually an inventor - which he is.
- fchollet 14y ago
  It's important to note that none of these achievements are AI-related (apart from character recognition, but that's a terribly shallow form of AI). What's more, none of these are particularly impressive from a technology point of view, what's interesting are just the product ideas.
  - michaelochurch 14y ago
    People who have the autonomy and backing to do "real AI" and have those kinds of achievements don't change jobs often. If someone has real accomplishments in AI, that person's going to be very hard to hire away, because quality jobs are rare. For all the hullabaloo, Director isn't that high at Google. He's not being hired as a VP (there are hundreds of those) or Google Fellow. It's not a bad gig, and I'm sure he'll get to work on interesting stuff, but I would have imagined a guy of his caliber getting more.
  - CptCodeMonkey 14y ago
    > none of these are particularly impressive from a technology point of view It's the "first" part that somewhat matters more and then it become's a question of whether he's more Edison or Tesla ( crazy marketing or crazy smart). Also he's been put into a Director role, so his technical merits come second to his ability to find, understand, and cultivate the smart people needed for his department's goals.
    - waterlesscloud 14y ago
rohern 14y ago
I tend to agree with you. I am not aware of any major contributions he has made to AI and his recent work on the human brain is shallow and unscientific. However, Google is not dumb. They have Peter Norvig heading Google X and a team of AI engineers recruited by Norvig. Perhaps Kurzweil is just the hand guiding the ship, but not the one pulling the oars?
- taligent 14y ago
  > However, Google is not dumb. They did buy Motorola Mobility.
  - Lost_BiomedE 14y ago
    Well, in the 'they did for the patents' defense, it is hard to quantify the value there. We also need to wait and see if they have more plans for it. Google buying youtube was considered dumb until quite recently.
- iandanforth 14y ago
  Norvig is a very very smart guy, however he wrote the textbook on a period of AI that is very far removed from the biologically inspired machine learning techniques (Hinton, Hawkins) that I would classify as cutting edge and 'most likely to succeed.' His decision to work with Hinton lately I think is a testament to his intelligence. Kurzweil has recognized the value of Hawkins' ideas and based his latest book on them, though I and others (http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/11/ray-kurzweils-dubious-new-theory-of-mind.html http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/11/ray-kurz...) don't think he did a great job on it. Full Disclosure: I work at Numenta (Hawkins company) but these opinions are my own.
  - jimbokun 14y ago
    From the New Yorker article: Even more disappointing is the fact that Kurzweil never bothers to do what any scientist, especially one trained in computer science, would immediately want to do, which is to build a computer model that instantiated his theory, and then compare the predictions of the model with real human behavior. This is quite damning, if true, and reconciles the apparent discrepancy in this discussion between "Kurzweil, brilliant inventor" and "Kurzweil, futurist hack." Is it possible that Kurzweil, at some point, stopped being an implementer of ideas and became a pure pontificater?
dj2stein9 14y ago
Agreed. I think this hire by Google is largely for PR. If Google was very serious about A.I. I think they would have just acquired Jeff Hawkins' Numenta and his neuroscience crew, who have real, practical "brain-building" experience.
- toomuchtodo 14y ago
  Give it time. It took them a bit to hire the Stanford team who won the DARPA self-driving vehicle contest after it was done.
- rst 14y ago
  That assumes that Numenta's principals would have been willing to sell. You can't take that for granted.
rpm4321 14y ago
God damn it... Not this again. =================MY PREVIOUS POSTS================= I don't think that's a very fair assessment of Kurzweil's role in technology. He was on the ground, getting his hands dirty with the first commercial applications of AI. He made quite a bit of money selling his various companies and technologies, and was awarded the presidential Medal of Technology from Clinton. As I was growing up, there was a series of "Oh wow!" moments I had, associated with computers and the seemingly sci-fi things they were now capable of. "Oh wow, computers can read printed documents and recognize the characters!" "Oh wow, computers can read written text aloud!" "Oh wow, computers can recognize speech!" "Oh wow, computer synthesizers can sound just like pianos now!" I didn't realize until much later that Kurzweil was heavily involved with all of those breakthroughs. =========================================== In addition, I'd rank Minsky, Larry Page, Bill Gates, Dean Kamen, Peter, Norvig, Rafael Reif, Tomaso Poggio, Dileep George, and Kurzweil's other supporters as much more qualified to judge the merits of his ideas, than Kurzweil's detractors like Hofstadter, Kevin Kelly, Mitch Kapor, and Gary Marcus. It seems that Hofstadter is the only one of that group who is really qualified to render a verdict. http://howtocreateamind.com/ http://howtocreateamind.com/ ===================================== Here's Peter Norvig himself on Kurzweil: “Ray’s contributions to science and technology, through research in character and speech recognition and machine learning, have led to technological achievements that have had an enormous impact on society – such as the Kurzweil Reading Machine, used by Stevie Wonder and others to have print read aloud. We appreciate his ambitious, long-term thinking, and we think his approach to problem-solving will be incredibly valuable to projects we’re working on at Google.” and him effusively praising Ray at a Google Talks event: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zihTWh5i2C4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zihTWh5i2C4 - @1:25
- foobarqux 14y ago
  What does it mean to say that Kurzweil was "heavily involved" in those breakthroughs? Did he contribute in a significant way to the science? Did he commercialize pre-existing ideas from academia?
  - joe_the_user 14y ago
    As founder of Kurzweil Computer Products, Inc, Select College Consulting Program, Medical Learning Company, etc., one would assume he was some combination of visionary, manager and (very occasionally) programmer. You assume he will be something similar at Google. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil
Florin_Andrei 14y ago
> This strikes me as an exceedingly poor investment. Granted it's an area he's almost religiously devoted to but I have seen no evidence whatsoever of any kind of RESULTS from him in this field. Sounds like investors talking about Columbus in 1491.
varelse 14y ago
If you haven't seen any evidence of results from him, then you haven't actually been looking. Because his results speak volumes. For example, the Kurzweil K2000 synthesizer illustrates exactly how he approaches problem solving - brute force - 64 MB of memory in 1991, utterly wretched price/performance ratio but awesome performance if considered on that dimension alone. And the above is 100% consistent IMO with google's approach to solving problems - throw hundreds of thousands of computers at it. He should make an excellent cultural fit. Because today's ridiculous brute force is tomorrow's low-end cell phone.

michaelochurch 14y ago

I know of a cool way he could test the unlimitedness of his resources.

georgemcbay 14y ago
... he could buy a Nexus 4 on Google Play and try to get support for it from a real live person?
- ChrisClark 14y ago
  I bought a Nexus 4 and phoned up phone support to ask about the shipping. I was immediately connected to a live person, I was told when it shipped and when I would expect it. Love the phone, totally worth it.
- UnFleshedOne 14y ago
  Just being able to buy a nexus 4 on google play would be impressive on its own...

mej10 14y ago

Google scares me more than other companies because of their handle on AI. I wish they at least appeared to take existential risk around AI seriously. Having Kurzweil near the top isn't exactly comforting, either.

fudged71 14y ago
Are there any indications that they are not taking AI risks seriously?
- mej10 14y ago
  To my knowledge they haven't published anything around AI risk or released any statements/positions publicly. That doesn't mean that they aren't taking it seriously, but it is at least a strong signal to me.
  - fudged71 14y ago
    Best I can find: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/july-dec02/google_11-29.html http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/july-dec02/google_11... SPENCER MICHELS: Sergay Brin thinks the ultimate search engine would be something like the computer named Hal in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. SERGEY BRIN: Hal could... had a lot of information, could piece it together, could rationalize it. Now, hopefully, it would never... it would never have a bug like Hal did where he killed the occupants of the space ship. But that's what we're striving for, and I think we've made it a part of the way there.
    - nova 14y ago
      Funny, because Hal didn't had a bug. It did what it did interpreting the orders that humans gave it. Just unintended consequences. Which is kinda the point about AI safety. We don't really know what we want, we sure as hell don't know how to formalize it, and we're lucky that we don't know how to create a real AI because otherwise it could surprise us in a very ugly way, just lawfully following the plan we gave it.
    - 14y ago

toddh 14y ago

Not to mention if anyone will have the resources to create and host the singularity, it would be Google.

finisterre 14y ago

I doubt that Kurzweil has truly been granted "unlimited" access to Google's resources. His title of "director of engineering" sounds impressive, but there's so far little indication he will be a very senior figure at the company.

danielweber 14y ago
Yeah, is he allowed to hire absolutely anyone he wants? Google has billions in the bank and can afford to be silly for quite some time, but probably not unlimited silly.
astrodust 14y ago
Considering the resources given to something as standard as a team working on a better search algorithm, which is thousands of servers, I'm pretty sure he's going to have access to pretty much whatever he wants. A petabyte of memory? Two hundred thousand cores? Done and done.

ldargin 14y ago

This looks like a lot of "20% time", concentrated in one person.

noonespecial 14y ago

The problem with giving truly gifted inventors all the resources they want is that they often end up inventing Segways. The kind of desperate, burning passion that Wozniak had when inventing the Apple computer doesn't seem to be something that any established company has ever been able to intentionally recreate.

Lost_BiomedE 14y ago
Segway and all that Bell Labs stuff...
- Aco- 14y ago
  I can't upvote this hard enough
- noonespecial 14y ago
  That actually is a good point. The thought crossed my mind while I wrote the above followed instantly with "well Bell labs, and to some extent IBM in the early days was different." I can't quite put my finger on why. Some sort of constrained, institutionalized invention in which a culture of talented but not "rockstar" inventors were allowed to simply sit around and try to impress each other (this was probably somewhat accidental), but at the same time were expected to be generating innovations and filing patents (this was the intentional part). There was a fairly lively discussion (either here or on slashdot) a few years ago about whether or not Google with its 20% rule could be the next Bell Labs. Driverless cars and Goolge glasses are cool, but it wasn't quite the landslide of cool everyone was hoping back then. It might just come down to the difference between "create a world changing technology for us, cost is no object" and "go work on whatever you think is cool, and don't worry about the bills".

jinushaun 14y ago

More proof that Google is SkyNet.

benth 14y ago

His resources will grow exponentially!

jrogers65 14y ago

>Google already has goldmine of info about us; knows where we are, interests, friends, reads our mails before we do. What if it understands? I do not think that I am alone when I say "please, for the love of god, don't let this happen."

Gmo 14y ago
No, you're not alone, that's why I try to put my eggs in several baskets, some of them being my own.

mark_l_watson 14y ago

I appreciate the comments from sceptics, but I look forward to seeing what progress they make. I hope to see a lot of progress using deep neural networks, HMMs, etc. I remember bringing a bumper sticker "AI, it's for Real" home from the 1982 AAAI conference and putting it on my car, so I may a little biased.

astrodust 14y ago
The number of cores Google has in their server farms is such a large number you need to use exponential notation. To say it's an AI researcher's paradise is putting it mildly.

SiVal 14y ago

I hope he'll use some of those resources to upload existing intelligences such as, oh, me. Of course, then I might end up in Google Drive or maybe a low-rated app in the Google app store....

bitwize 14y ago

This has got to be some kind of gag. Kurzweil is such a known kook that hiring him to work on AI is like hiring William Shatner to collaborate on your music project: the only possible way it could be legitimate is in an ironic sense.

pjscott 14y ago
Kurzweil did a lot of good work on AI a while back; he came by his fame legitimately, as an engineer and startup founder. If he had then kept his mouth shut about his predictions for the future, nobody would find his hiring at Google particularly surprising. (Don't believe me? Google it.)

wololo 14y ago

question for you: how does Kurzweil's role in Google compare to Regina Dugan's?

Tycho 14y ago

sorry to be off topic, but the article used this word 'breathless.' I've noticed this word constantly appearing since about 18 months ago. Prior to that, I don't think I encountered it much except in reference to The Corrs' pop hit Breathless (which drew heavily on an 80s Belinda Carlisle track). Am I the only one puzzled by its sudden surgence? Sidenote: weird how 'surgence' isn't a word in the dictionary

johnohara 14y ago

The detractors are few when the discussion is about IBM's Watson. It "competed against" the best Jeopardy players and is now said to be "going to medical school." http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/30/i-b-m-s-watson-goes-to-medical-school/ http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/30/i-b-m-s-watson-goes... But it's still a machine. Albeit with very sophisticated and very useful capabilities. And as far as I know, has not expressed self-awareness. Yet given the fundamental nature of how Watson works it would seem logical to think that Google might one day have to compete with IBM in a number of areas where Watson excels -- medical diagnosis for example. Or worldwide financial analysis. To do so, Google will need strong voice recognition and text-to-speech capabilities which Ray Kurzweil can help with immediately.

yid 14y ago
My hunch is that voice recognition and text-to-speech are the least of the concerns that Kurzweil will be dealing with. My guess is that his insights would be more applied to semantic reasoning using massive datasets (i.e., the Web), to build the engine that does the reasoning and answering rather than just the input/output layer.

varelse 14y ago

I'll enjoy the ensuing hilarity within google if "Unlimited Resources(tm)" leads to a request for a datacenter full of GPUs... Just sayin'...

hexagonc 14y ago

I think that the Kurzweil skeptics are focusing entirely on the wrong thing when they criticize Kurzweil's technical chops. He isn't being hired as an engineer; he's going to be Director of Engineering. If any of his ideas or proposals are fanciful, there are plenty of people, including Peter Norvig, to set him straight. What is noteworthy about this hiring is that for the first time, a company with serious technical ability and resources is going to be tackling strong AI. No, there was nothing in the announcement that directly mentions strong AI but I contend that they will have to tackle at least certain aspects of strong AI in order to make significant progress in speech recognition. You can only get so far using the standard tricks that are used with traditional natural language understanding (NLU). At some point, the system is going to have to have an abstract model of the way the world works in order to mimic the assumptions that human intelligence requires in order to understand language. This shouldn't be all that surprising given what they are trying to do with Google Now. Google Now is different from other products using speech recognition because it is active; it behaves more like an independent AI agent. Think about what Google will have to do to improve its performance; it will need to build a model the user's behavior in order to tune the probability distributions that underlie the best interpretations for what someone is searching for. You see, language understanding in humans sits upon a sizable foundation of innate assumptions about the way the world, including other humans, works. My claim is that Google have to duplicate much of this in order to get better technical performance from Google Now as well as search. It will need to have a prior knowledge about people in general and modify that knowledge over time by what it learns about a particular user. What I have just described is the missing component in efforts to develop strong AI -- the mechanism by which a distributed AI can learn to mimic aspects of human thinking via evolution. (I'm a functionalist, as you've probably gleaned already, so I would argue that the only way to improve NLU is to ground the processing in "real" understanding on some level.) Now, Canonical could build a Google Now type system for their Ubuntu phones and seed the learning algorithms with an open source, wiki-AI type project -- you don't need Google to create such a system. But Google has the monetary incentive, resources, and now the technical vision (Kurzweil) to justify pursuing this on a large scale, just as they did with their search engine. What was the primary thing that Apple did to reach their current level of success? They tried things that other people poo-pooed. It wasn't that the iPhone and the iPad were technically that amazing -- that's why people are unimpressed with the quality of the patents Apple has asserted -- it's that they were the first to seriously try a lot of the features that are now standard. As is often said around here, 90% of success is showing up. The company I work for directly competes with Google in areas related to Google Now and I tell you I got a little nervous when I heard they had hired Kurzweil. Again, not because of his technical abilities but because now we have to worry that Google is going to come up with something totally crazy out of left field. The fact that Kurzweil is crazy is precisely why I worry.