6 ms·

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

by 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.

by ebbv 14y ago

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.