Ray Kurzweil joins Google

http://www.kurzweilai.net/kurzweil-joins-google-to-work-on-new-projects-involving-machine-learning-and-language-processing?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

by dumitrue • 14 years ago

312 163 14 years ago

kurzweilai.net

nonsequ• 14 years ago

Can anyone shed some light on what 'Director of Engineering' might mean at Google? It sounds rather unassuming for a person of his stature.

mvgoogler• 14 years ago

Director is generally the management level just below VP.

I don't know the specifics of this situation though, so take it with a grain of salt. reply

ChuckMcM2• 14 years ago

For a long time it was the highest grade you could be hired in as since Google didn't feel like the title "Vice President" in Google meant the same thing as other places. I know VP's they gave offers to, who turned down the offer on the basis of having to take the title of director. At one time you had a limited amount of time post hire to 'prove yourself' or be managed out of the organization.

I found the hire curious from the standpoint that Kurzweil's tendency to handwave rather than retreat to data has historically been a red flag in the hiring process at Google. This tended to unfairly penalize theorists over experimentalists at Google. One wonders if they've changed.

I remember him giving a tech talk and talking about how many computers you'd need to simulate a brain and how nobody would put that together for years yet, and chuckling knowingly :-).

ilaksh2• 14 years ago

His tendency to handwave rather than retreat to data? What the heck are you talking about? Have you seen how many graphs he puts in his presentations?

You think he's a theorist rather than an experimentalist? How can you possibly get that idea with all of his game-changing inventions?

nazgulnarsil• 14 years ago

Signaling is important in the maintenance and direction of culture. Whoever made this decision is making a statement about what sorts of projects they want google to work on in the future.

scarmig• 14 years ago

I wonder if his political/visionary/famous aspects played a positive, negative, or neutral role in the hire.

zephjc• 14 years ago

Google continues its move towards the ad-driven singularity.

alperakgun• 14 years ago

google is hedging itself against singularity. When the day comes. Google valuation will jump exponentially within a matter of minutes.

saalweachter• 14 years ago

And here I thought the Singularity referred to Apple's stock price.

dhughes• 14 years ago

I think he's eying their massive server farm as a spot to park his brain. He just called shotgun for the Singularity.

cheeseprocedure• 14 years ago

I wonder if we'll be able to submit pull requests.

ilaksh2• 14 years ago

I wonder if this will be a wake up call for some of the people who think his predictions of super-human AI are a joke.

I mean even if you don't believe in the Singularity, you must believe in Google, right?

Devilboy• 14 years ago

2029: Although computers routinely pass the Turing Test, controversy still persists over whether machines are as intelligent as humans in all areas.

-- The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999)

vertr• 14 years ago

>even if you don't believe in the Singularity

This makes "the singularity" sound very much like a religion.

kanzure8• 14 years ago

> This makes "the singularity" sound very much like a religion.

I think what most people mean is, "even if you don't believe that anything other than squishy brains can ever recursively do what the brain does".

jfb• 14 years ago

It's faith-based handwaving bafflegab. So, yes, only without the intellectual credibility.

majormajor• 14 years ago

What does "believing in Google" mean in this context?

Believe that they'd never be mistaken?

GuiA2• 14 years ago

Saw him give a talk promoting his latest book last month, was heavily disappointed. Ideas are presented in a way to fit nicely together, but ultimately lack any depth or critical insights. I recall someone calling it "creationism for people with an IQ over 140"; it's a fair description.

It's a shame, he's brought many great contributions to our field, but I fear he has jumped the shark a while ago. Maybe going to Google will force him to work on solutions to problems of which the correctness can be more easily assessed.

praxeologist2• 14 years ago

>It's a shame, he's brought many great contributions to our field

What field? The fluffsters? Saying stuff like, "Ideas are presented in a way to fit nicely together, but ultimately lack any depth or critical insights.", is saying nothing.

GuiA2• 14 years ago

He did a lot of work in text to speech, speech recognition, OCR, etc. back in the day.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil#Mid-life

vecinu• 14 years ago

I tend to feel the same way about him and the state of his life at the moment.

I am very grateful for the inventions he brought forth and his work on AI but I think his current goals in life are unreasonable and of course, related to the death of his father.

As much as he doesn't want to be human anymore, his entire goal in life relies on the human condition...to reconnect with his father and transgress life in its current form.

I think he could do so much more at the moment if, like you said, he would focus on problems that can be solved as soon as possible and demonstrate a use of his solution.

Alex39172• 14 years ago

"Ideas are presented in a way to fit nicely together, but ultimately lack any depth or critical insights."

While are a number of obvious problems with the theory, it's still an invaluable idea. Even if 2042 doesn't pan it, Kurzweil has still provided an enormously powerful tool to help understand the world around us. (Well, technically he didn't invent the idea, but he was the one who did most of the work aggregating the data.)

jere6• 14 years ago

>I recall someone calling it "creationism for people with an IQ over 140"; it's a fair description.

Really? Because if so, then they stole that quote almost verbatim from Mitch Kapor when he was discussing the singularity in 2007. And it seems to have a lot less relevance to a book about how the brain works than it does to an imagined singularity.

>Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus Development Corporation, has called the notion of a technological singularity "intelligent design for the IQ 140 people...This proposition that we're heading to this point at which everything is going to be just unimaginably different—it's fundamentally, in my view, driven by a religious impulse. And all of the frantic arm-waving can't obscure that fact for me."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil#Criticism

Osmium2• 14 years ago

In fairness, that's how good quotes usually work: they tend to be retold time and again and adopted for other purposes until it's no longer clear who said it originally. So I wouldn't be too quick to call fowl on this one. I'm not sure one can "steal" a quote...

shod• 14 years ago

Or the "someone" GuiA recalls was Mitch Kapor.

6ren• 14 years ago

It's as if you took a lot of very good food and some dog excrement and blended it all up so that you can't possibly figure out what's good or bad. http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/douglas-r-hof...

I see what DRF means, and The Singularity is Near did seem mostly a perfunctory literature review, with important issues not discussed, just skimmed over. (For example, he doesn't discussed the causes of accelerating returns, doesn't support the causes with data, only the effects. Another example: is it necessarily true that we are intelligent enough to understand ourselves? We're effective when we can something decompose hierarchically into simpler concepts... but what if there isn't such a decomposition of intelligence? i.e. the simplest decomposition is too complex for us to grasp. Hofstadner asks if a giraffe is intelligent enough to understand itself.)

But I thought he supported his basic thesis, that progress is accelerating, compellingly. Really did a great job (seems to be the result of ongoing criticism, and him finding ways to refute it).

rpm43218• 14 years ago

DRH?

eksabajt• 14 years ago

Douglas Richard Hofstadter

backprojection• 14 years ago

>For example, he doesn't discussed the causes of accelerating returns, doesn't support the causes with data, only the effects.

I agree with this. It seems to be a huge hole in the entire discussion. It's not enough to cite historical data, and assert that exponential growth will continue indefinitely. I could speculate a bit about some explanations. But I'm curious if there are any good discussions out there, does anyone have some recommendations?

slacka6• 14 years ago

I also found it annoying that in all his examples of exponential growth biological system he conveniently left out where the populations crash after reaching an environmental limit. I think it's just as likely that technology will send us back into the stone age with nukes or bio-weapons as it is we merge with AI.

waterlesscloud• 14 years ago

It's seemed pretty clear to me for some time that Google's real mission is AI/singularity oriented and everything else is just a step along that road. It may not be what the day-to-day view is in the trenches, but it seems like the high level plan.

A hire like this one certainly reinforces that perception.

I don't know if it's truly possible to accomplish, but it's fascinating to see a major company taking steps in that directions.

nostrademons3• 14 years ago

"Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

If you take that to the limit, the logical consequence is some sort of planet-wise consciousness that can instantly pull up any of humanity's collective knowledge at a moment's notice.

Raphael• 14 years ago

Doesn't it already do that?

xianshou2• 14 years ago

Google: maximizing the sum of consciousness.

dbyrd2• 14 years ago

Google has thousands of employees who all have a moderate amount of autonomy. I don't think they have a singular goal. They just do a bunch of stuff around organizing the world's data. Naturally AI/singularity oriented projects tend to emerge.

mmahemoff• 14 years ago

I've looked at Google this way since George Dyson wrote his "Turing's Cathedral" essay after he visited in 2005 [1].

The comments about book scanning led to some controversy at the time [2], which gave a glimpse into Google's AI motivations that have now become much more explicit, thanks to projects like Google Now, Google Glass, and self-driving cars.

1. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dyson05/dyson05_index.html

2. http://www.zdnet.com/google-side-steps-ai-rumours-3039237225...

michaelochurch4• 14 years ago

I wonder how the blind allocation process will treat him. His domain expertise is AI, but he didn't do any of that At Google, which means it doesn't exist. So is he going to have to spend 18 months maintaining a legacy ad-targeting product while the 26-year-old Staff SWE next to him works on its replacement? How is he going to handle that?

dumitrue• 14 years ago

Why would you ever think that he is being blindly allocated to the position of Director of Engineering? In that position, he'll pretty much be in control of his own destiny at Google.

michaelochurch4• 14 years ago

When I was there, Directors were still above the Real Googler Line, but it may have moved up in the time since then. Also, he lives in Massachusetts, which means he'll only get the work that MTV doesn't want (unless he moves). Finally, with his visibility, he's going to get a lot of prank Perf and his manager is going to have a hard time promoting him because of that.

pratikjhaveri• 14 years ago

Stop trolling! I'm not even an ex-Googler and know about your constant complaints. Move on! Life's too short buddy.

michaelochurch4• 14 years ago

That actually was an attempt at humor.

Google is badly managed but they're not going to subject a heavyweight like that to their typical nonsense (blind allocation, manager-as-SPOF) and if they do, I'm sure he'll be just fine.

jonmc12• 14 years ago

Given Kurzweil's age and stated goals, I'm thinking there is no way he is going to Google unless they are investing in life extension / prevention of death.

Read between the lines - "next decade’s ‘unrealistic’ visions" - is likely nothing less than brain computer interfaces with the end goal of extending life by storing the entire human mind on a machine. Certainly not far off from Kurweil's timelines on Law of Accelerating Returns. I can understand why the PR does not say this, but it seems clear this is where Kurzweil would want to invest his time.

rdl• 14 years ago

Heh, Google Life Extension, so you can live longer and thus view more ads in your lifetime.

cs702• 14 years ago

Thanks in part to the popularity of his books, movie, and speeches, Kurzweil now knows pretty much every AI researcher in the planet, and we can safely assume he's aware of even very obscure research projects in the field, both inside and outside academia.

Joining Google gives him ready access to data sets of almost unimaginable size, as well as unparalleled infrastructure and skills for handling such large data sets, putting him in an ideal position to connect researchers in academic and corporate settings with the data, infrastructure, and data management skills they need to make their visions a reality.

According to the MIT Technology Review[1], he will be working with Peter Norvig, who is not just Google's Director of Research, but a well-known figure in AI.

[1] http://www.technologyreview.com/view/508896/what-google-sees...

cschmidt• 14 years ago

I just can't see Kurzweil being in the same league as Peter Norvig. Sure, he did some interesting work a long time ago, before he got weird. I can't see this working out well for Google, unless they just want a famous figurehead.

kanzure8• 14 years ago

> Sure, he did some interesting work a long time ago, before he got weird.

You know, it would be wonderful if Ray Kurzweil actually works on software/hardware projects, and he's just hush-hush because he doesn't want to release experiments. Maybe he does more than writing books and speaking at conferences, and he secretly provisions ec2 clusters to experiment with Hadoop or whatever. Maybe he's not just some old geezer that pops lots of pills, maybe he's an old geezer that pops pills and writes Go.

At least, that's what I tell myself to not be as angry about his "prediction from a distance" branding.

On a somewhat related note, http://heybryan.org/fernhout/ has some old emails someone sent to Ray, exploring his lack of involvement in the open source transhumanist hardware/software community.

rpm43218• 14 years ago

I'm reposting this comment I made a couple of months ago. He's no John McCarthy, but he was a true pioneer in the commercial applications of AI:

==================================

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.

rpm43218• 14 years ago

Here's 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.”

noonespecial• 14 years ago

>Sure, he did some interesting work a long time ago, before he got weird.

He was weird then too. That's why he did such interesting work. His work, combined with a lack of fame at that time, just kept the weird from showing through.

I suspect that genius is made up almost, but not quite, entirely of crazy.

mtgx4• 14 years ago

A lot of visionaries are misunderstood because they can "see" things the others can't at the time, and it doesn't make sense to them, which is why they think they are "weird" or "crazy". From that point of view, Richard Stallman was also a visionary, even if it took 2-3 decades before his visions of states or companies putting backdoors in your proprietary software became true.

trimes2• 14 years ago

I'm more reluctant to trash Kurzweil, but this image hiring policy is taking on the look of some sort of bizarre Victorian menagerie where they keep old famous computer scientists in wrought iron cages for Googlers' amusement. It's like the Henry Ford museum, but they're collecting people. That's more than a little weird.

slacka6• 14 years ago

> I just can't see Kurzweil being in the same league as Peter Norvig.

The problem with Peter Norvig is that he comes from a mathematical background and is a strong defender the use of statistical models that have no biological basis.[1] While they have their use in specific areas, they will never lead us to a general purpose strong AI.

Lately Kurzweil has come around to see that symbolic and bayesian networks have been holding AI back for the past 50 years. He is now a proponent of using biologically inspired methods similar to Jeff Hawkins' approach of Hierarchical Temporal Memory.

Hopefully, he'll bring some fresh ideas to Google. This will be especially useful in areas like voice recognition and translation. For example, just last week, I needed to translate. "I need to meet up" to Chinese. Google translates it to 我需要满足, meaning "I need to satisfy". This is where statistical translations fail, because statistics and probabilities will never teach machines to "understand" language.

[1] http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/06/norvig-vs-chomsky-and-the-f...

mtgx4• 14 years ago

You do realize Ray Kurzweil is behind the initial technology of Nuance, which Apple uses for Siri now.

brendano• 14 years ago

Thanks in part to the popularity of his books, movie, and speeches, Kurzweil now knows pretty much every AI researcher in the planet

Um...

More important question: how many AI researchers respect the last 20 years of his work?

mtgx4• 14 years ago

I think Peter Norvig may have been the one to invite him to give this speech at Google last month:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zihTWh5i2C4

nnq3• 14 years ago

He's a "connector", a large company need people like him. Even if he was a sub-par engineer, and I bet he's not, he would still be a valuable hire, especially if they want to rebrand themselves as an "AI company".

trhtrsh3• 14 years ago

re-brand? Google has been an AI company since 1998.

brandall102• 14 years ago

I'm somewhat surprised there are comments debating what use he could be to Google or what interest they might have in him - Google is one of the primary backers of Singularity University. They already have a working relationship. Now he's an employee. Don't get how this could be a stretch.

Singularity U as far as I understand is not really there so people can more quickly get to the point of uploading their brain to the cloud or anything - it's essentially for business strategists who want to have a better grasp of where things will be in 5-10+ years out. If the Goog believes strongly in the Kurz's ability to do this then it seems like a pretty nice score for the Goog.

kanzure8• 14 years ago

> They already have a working relationship. Now he's an employee. Don't get how this could be a stretch.

Maybe because of his role at Google, "Director of Engineering". That's not a good description of what Singularity University offers their customers. They do maybe one or two field trips to BioCurious and call it quits.

Also, why is Singularity University managing TedxAustin? That was a bizarre email to see.

brandall102• 14 years ago

Really? Their stated goal is: "assemble, educate and inspire a cadre of leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies and apply, focus and guide these tools to address humanity’s grand challenges."

Why would this not in alignment w/ Google's aim for such a position? Why would they not want a strategist they believe who could direct their engineering staff in this manner?

The people who attend the university are CEOs, CTOs... Directors of Engineering, etc. It's not for fringe kooks to congregate in celebration of the upcoming nerd rapture. Not at $25k/10 weeks it ain't.

I get that he's a polarizing figure. But there are some very powerful people in this world who believes the man can walk on water.

nealabq2• 14 years ago

What's Kurzweil's motive?

He's a visionary who can deliver a finished product. I think he must have some pretty specific ideas, and he wants to partner with Google.

A few guesses:

- New interfaces to replace keyboard/mouse/touch. Voice, gesture, face, brainwaves. Sign language with humming, blinking, and pupil pointing. Works with tablets, TVs, wearables, cars, buildings, ATMs, etc.

- SuperPets (r) that can pass the Turing test. And do the shopping.

- Surgically implanted Bluetooth. (It could literally be a tooth!)

- Hover skateboards.

- The Matrix. (Or the 13th Floor, which was a better movie in my not-so humble opinion.)

I don't think it'll have to do with life-extension though. That's just too crazy far out-there.

kanzure8• 14 years ago

> - New interfaces to replace keyboard/mouse/touch. Voice, gesture, face, brainwaves.

Unfortunately, it turns out you can only get a limited number of bits out by looking at brainwaves (EEG). Gesture is much higher bandwidth, and keyboards seem to be the highest.

nealabq2• 14 years ago

But American Sign Language is gestures, and it seems higher bandwidth than spoken English. Just an informal uninformed observation, I don't know ASL.

And I can't type as fast as I can talk. So I'm thinking gesticulating > speaking > typing.

bquarant• 14 years ago

Saving this post to laugh at later.

rpm43218• 14 years ago

fMRI is extremely high bandwidth and still in its infancy, and we are currently getting pretty good performance from relatively basic invasive neural implants on the disabled. I've read a couple of interesting articles on breakthroughs regarding the miniaturization of fMRI technology, so I think it's safe to say that keyboards will not be the highest bandwidth interface in the decades to come.

joey_muller• 14 years ago

Wow, Google's stock should rise on this news. Many folks may not know Kurzweil keyboards (for music), but they are excellent. I can't wait to see where he leads us next.

pbw• 14 years ago

Seems sad, I'd like to see Kurzweil form another startup and get bought by Google, rather than go work for them. I assume he could self-fund something, I don't how his hedge funds are doing.

But maybe he's been there and done that, and wants mucho resources from day one. Maybe the AI space has grown up and it's hard to start up companies now, you need the resources and big data sets to do anything significant? Or he's just after the free lunches.

queensnake• 14 years ago

Maybe Google has a monopoly on all the smartest people anymore, or, is just one-stop shopping for support for the biggest ideas. Ray's worth 27 million and as you said has many of his own companies, he doesn't need a salary.

dinkumthinkum2• 14 years ago

The problem is, and I don't want to be mean about it, is that Kurzweil is a crackpot and charlatan. This is not to take away from his intelligence or his technical achievements, which are indisputable. However, even Nobel prize winners can be outright crackpots and crazies (Nobel disease).

I don't know exactly what Google's motives are here, I suspect it's something less than actually bringing about some of his, let's say, loftier ideas.

Lost_BiomedE• 14 years ago

If I were Google, I would hire him just to mumble into a recorder all day. Then have a small team decipher and escalate possible ideas.

nnq3• 14 years ago

gotta love this guy:

> 1%... you're pretty much finished... try that with product submission schedules [1]

...so now we know who to blame for future Google product delays.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zihTWh5i2C4

EDIT: added the source link

TommyDANGerous• 14 years ago

Google will build Skynet, and Skynet will take us over.

samskiter• 14 years ago

I think this is the real let down prediction:

In 2008, Ray Kurzweil said in an expert panel in the National Academy of Engineering that solar power will scale up to produce all the energy needs of Earth's people in 20 years.

lololololol

Ray Kurzweil joins Google

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