Ray Kurzweil

Yeah, Singularity is Near, I think it was the title of it.

It was the one where he invented the term singularity, which a lot of people in AI had been thinking about for a long, long time, but nobody had crystallized it into a term.

And now the topic of are we in the singularity is gonna come up constantly until it's in the rear view mirror.

But it was world changing for me because I had read a lot of analysis from Danny Ellis, I'm sure you know Danny, who built the connection machine.

trying to predict how much compute will it take for us to crack open AI.

And it's not an easy problem at all.

Nobody had really put pen to paper and said, I'm going to put dates on this and I'm going to put curves on this.

Because, you know, to plan your life and to plan a business, you need to have some prediction.

And it's more needed now, I think, than ever before.

And you were the first person to say, you know what, I'm going to name it.

And I'm going to predict an exact date.

And I swear, when you predict the future, as you and Peter do, if you're 99% right and 1% wrong, everybody likes to jump on that 1%.

But as a service to the world, making those predictions is just a blessing, because then you can build your life and your career around the future and not around the past.

Yeah, well, after the singularities near came out, Stanford had a conference basically to examine whether my prediction was correct or not.

And several hundred experts came from around the world and they agreed that this would happen, that human level AI would happen.

Yeah.

But they figured it would be 100 years, not 30 years.

Yeah.

And what I was predicting was AGI would happen by 2029.

The singularity, which really represents a million fold increase, would happen by 2045.