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by wrycoder 1265 days ago
Kurzweil's "Singularity" is upon us, but he's now being cagey about it.

He says it's still years away. His interview with Lex Fridman[0] was pretty tame - I didn't learn much new from it. Kurzweil deflected the Singularity segment to be a discussion about the history of computer power.

Remember that Kurzweil is Director of Engineering[1] at Google, with the mandate to "bring natural language understanding to Google"[2]. He started there in 2012, just after publishing his book, "How to Create a Mind"[3], and that's exactly what he and his team have been doing for ten years. Publication of his new book, "The Singularity is Nearer"[4] is now pushed out to mid 2023. Maybe he'll change the title to "Here" by then. (It's hard to believe that OpenAI is actually ahead of Google.)

Fridman made the point that maybe we won't realize at the time that the Singularity is passing, and only understand later that it did. Kurzweil didn't disagree.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykY69lSpDdo

[1] https://archive.is/vVEBv

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil

[3] https://www.amazon.com/How-Create-Mind-Thought-Revealed-eboo...

[4] https://www.amazon.com/s?k=kurzweil+singularity+is+nearer

1 comments

>It's hard to believe that OpenAI is actually ahead of Google.

Are Google's LLMs available for us to test out? From what I've gleaned, they've locked them up - I'd love to compare GPT vs Google's LLMs.

Google really doesn't share much publicly except for papers and preset tech demos.

However we know they have been working on AI longer than OpenAI, with better datasets than anyone, with top shelf talent, essentially infinite funding, custom hardware, and what we do see publicly is incredible.

It's a pretty safe bet that Google is ahead of the pack, perhaps even with some distance, but it's not yet clear what they intend to do long term with their projects. What is clear is that they don't want or need the public playing with it.