TechCrunch is also saying that this move is the latest by Google to build up its roster of artificial intelligence companies and experts in order to become dominant in the field.

“If all three of DeepMind’s founders work for Google, they will join inventor, entrepreneur, author, and futurist Ray Kurzweil, who was hired in 2012 as a director of engineering focused on machine learning and language processing.… read more

As advanced machine learning transitions from a primarily scientific pursuit to one with high industrial importance, Google’s bench is probably deepest.

Names it has lured from academia into full-time or part-time roles include Sebastian Thrun (who has worked on the company’s autonomous car project); Fernando Pereira, a onetime University of Pennsylvania computer scientist; Stanford’s Andrew Ng; and Singularity University boss Ray Kurzweil. [...]

It’s impossible to know at this stage exactly what Google is planning. In 2012, it hired the US inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil to “work on new projects involving machine learning and language processing.”

Larry Page and Kurzweil agreed on a one-sentence job description: “To bring natural language understanding to Google.” It’s a safe bet that Kurzweil is the brain behind Google’s plans for the Internet of Things.… read more

Kurzweil just released in Spain How to Create a Mind (Lola Books, 2013). A work setting out his theory of the brain that explains how we could recreate its secrets with the help of a computer.

His words are a window into a future in which the boundaries between life and death and our brains (which will be more powerful with the help of a computer) will blur.… read more

Google futurist Ray Kurzweil is working to improve its search function to the point where humans could type in a sentence, and the computer could understand the query on an emotional level.

And earlier this month, Yahoo acquired Aviate, a company that organizes and searches for phone apps based on what it thinks you’ll be looking for at a certain time. [...]

Move over, Nostradamus. Ray’s taking over as top prognosticator.

Kurzweil predicted when an internet would become central to daily life — back in the 1980s when few believed him. He predicted with startling accuracy when a computer could beat a world chess champion — eight years before it happened. But he also predicted the dismantling of the Soviet Union. What does Google’s genius clairvoyant say is coming? [...]… read more

According to Re/code, the acquisition was led by Larry Page, and it will add to a burgeoning AI team at Google — not least Ray Kurzweil, who was hired in 2012 to work on machine learning and language processing.

This is the latest move by Google to fill out its roster of artificial intelligence experts and, according to Re/code, the acquisition was reportedly led by Google CEO Larry Page.

If all three of DeepMind’s founders work for Google, they will join inventor, entrepreneur, author, and futurist Ray Kurzweil, who was hired in 2012 as a director of engineering focused on machine learning and language processing.

Kurzweil has said that

… read more

The rise of Google’s artificial intelligence: Google also hired futurist Ray Kurzweil as Engineering Director in 2012.

Kurzweil has famously claimed that in just over 30 years, humans will be able to upload their entire minds to computers and become digitally immortal — an event called singularity. He also claimed the biological parts of our body will be replaced with mechanical parts and this could happen as early as… read more

Kurzweil believes a conscious machine capable of understanding complex natural language will be developed within the next 16 years.

”I’ve had a consistent date of 2029 for that vision,” he told Wired, ”and that doesn’t just mean logical intelligence. It means emotional intelligence, being funny, getting the joke, being sexy, being loving, understanding human emotion.”

Google’s chief engineer, Ray Kurzweil, envisions a ”cybernetic friend” based on deep learning… read more