Google’s recently appointed director of engineering Ray Kurzweil has revealed details around an upcoming AI project for the company, focused on helping computers to better understand human language.

“The project I plan to do is focused on natural language understanding although it may have other applications,” said Kurzweil in a video interview with Singularity Hub, published on Thursday. “We want to give computers the ability to understand the… read more

In an exclusive with Singularity Hub, Ray Kurzweil gave one of his first interviews since the December announcement that he joined Google full time as Director of Engineering.

Speaking with Singularity Hub Founder Keith Kleiner, Ray discusses his new role, how his research interests connect with his latest book How To Create A Mind (which Keith recently interviewed Ray about here), and how technology will advance to… read more

World-renowned artificial intelligence expert andGoogle’s new Director of Engineering, Ray Kurzweil, wants to build a search engine so sophisticated that it could act like a ‘cybernetic friend,’ who knows users better than they know themselves.

“I envision in some years that the majority of search queries will be answered without you actually asking,” he said at an intimate gathering at Singularity University’s NASA campus. [...]

Will you be better off this year than your were in the past? To the futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil, the answer is a resounding yes. “We are far more productive and healthy and better off in every way than we were in the past,” Kurzweil, the author of the new book How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed, told Big Think in a… read more

Inventor Ray Kurzweil hopes to develop ways for humans to live forever, and while he’s at it, bring back his dead father. Behind him is the support of a tech giant. This month, Kurzweil, a futurist, stepped into the role of Director of Engineering at Google, focusing on machine learning and language processing.

“There is a lot of suffering in the world,” Kurzweil once said, according… read more

Last week, Google announced the hiring of Ray Kurzweil, who will work to solve complex language processing problems, among other things. In an interview last year, Kurzweil pointed out that language processing issues are among the most difficult problems to solve. Kurzweil will join the same company that employs Franz Och, the mastermind behind Google Translate (both were interviewed for my new book, Found in Translation).… read more

Google has hired famed inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil as Director of Engineering. Will he be a figurehead, or a driving force at the company?

Internet giant Google has made a very high-profile hire, bringing famed inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil on board as the company’s new director of engineering. Interestingly, the announcement wasn’t made by Google but by Kurzweil himself on his own site,… read more

The futurist Ray Kurzweil is known for his unwavering belief in human progress. In the interview he talks about his latest book, on machines that learn as children, and the hope of eternal life.

Q: Mr. Kurzweil, one of your main theses is that technological progress accelerates continuously. If we are now, for example, but smartphones, then the operating system of these devices is based on Unix, a… read more

Staff working at Google who think that the new Director of Engineering looks slightly familiar may not be too far off the mark, after the internet search giant announced the hiring of Ray Kurzweil for the position.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the acclaimed futurist and author of The Singularity Is Near, has been brought in to the company to work on a number of engineering research… read more