
Ray Kurzweil Says He’ll Get ‘Unlimited Resources’ to Work on AI at Google - iProject
http://betabeat.com/2013/01/ray-kurzweil-says-hell-get-unlimited-funds-to-work-on-ai-at-google/
======
ebbv
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.

~~~
rpm4321
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/>

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

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> \- @1:25

~~~
foobarqux
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?

~~~
rpm4321
Honestly, I think you're barking up the wrong tree here. Even his strongest
critics generally concede that he's a brilliant man who has contributed
significantly to technology.

Please understand, I'm not a Kurzweil fan boy. I do think a lot of his
conclusions are inevitable in the long term - say 100 years out - but I'd
guess it's 50/50 whether or not his timelines are too optimistic to benefit
any of us here personally.

What I'm reacting strongly to here is the knee-jerk dismissal of his
credentials and accomplishments by some on HN due to their incredulity towards
his later ideas. It doesn't encourage an informed debate, and quite frankly
smacks of a religious or political argument - which admittedly many of his
supporters are just as guilty of.

~~~
foobarqux
I just want to know what that contribution was exactly.

~~~
rpm4321
Go to the 'Life, inventions, and business career' section here, as well as the
overview section:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil>

~~~
akkartik
I read that, and I'm still not sure what you're talking about.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil#Recognition_and_a...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil#Recognition_and_awards)
is a pretty good summary of his accomplishments. He's had a full life, no
question, but how much of it was AI? His biggest AI accomplishment seems to be
in OCR technology with the Reading Machine back in the 70s. Other than that
his strengths seem to be in commercializing inventions, and in attaching his
name to his products.

------
mej10
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.

~~~
angersock
Existential risk around AI? Really?

That's just multiplying through by -1 the typical nerd wet dream about the
Singularity.

I can't even keep Rails, Apache, or git from occasionally shitting the bed; I
am not worried about AI just yet.

~~~
theorique
_That's just multiplying through by -1 the typical nerd wet dream about the
Singularity._

Well said. What is it that AI is supposed to do that's so scary, anyway?

~~~
Jach
What scary things do humans do, to each other and to lesser species? What
amazing things do humans do? What concept lets humans do anything noteworthy
at all? Here's a nice essay on the power of intelligence:
<http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/power>

~~~
taligent
Since when does intelligence = human intelligence ?

You would think an intelligent person would know this.

~~~
Jach
It doesn't. Hence the curiosities and concerns about general AI, non-human
intelligence, hopefully created by us humans, the first intelligences
intelligent enough to design their successor instead of letting a weaker non-
intelligent design process such as evolution happen upon it by chance.

The site I linked to has some good introductory material to the related
concepts. (<http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/intro> is short and to the
point.) <http://singularity.org/research/> lists some important texts to read,
and following up on the authors will lead to more. (An author I will also
recommend following for his practical pursuits is Ben Goertzel. Lastly, I
think this is a good criticism of the Singularity Institute's general mode of
operating: [http://kruel.co/2012/11/03/what-i-would-like-the-
singularity...](http://kruel.co/2012/11/03/what-i-would-like-the-singularity-
institute-to-publish/) But you should probably read that one last, if you
intend to read anything at all beyond the simple introduction.)

------
johnohara
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...](http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/30/i-b-m-s-watson-goes-to-
medical-school/)

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
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.

------
noonespecial
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
Segway and all that Bell Labs stuff...

~~~
noonespecial
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".

------
jrogers65
>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
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
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
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.

------
benth
His resources will grow exponentially!

------
finisterre
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.

~~~
astrodust
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.

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

Just sayin'...

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

------
Tycho
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

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

------
bitwize
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
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.)

------
SiVal
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....

------
jinushaun
More proof that Google is SkyNet.

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

------
hexagonc
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.

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

~~~
georgemcbay
... he could buy a Nexus 4 on Google Play and try to get support for it from a
real live person?

~~~
ChrisClark
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.

