The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

by Ray Kurzweil

About three decades ago, in 1993, I had a debate with my own mentor Marvin Minsky. I argued that we needed about 1014 calculations per second to begin to emulate human intelligence. Minsky, for his part, maintained that the amount of computation was not important, and that we could program a Pentium (the processor in a desktop computer from 1993) to be as intelligent as a human. Because we had such different opinions on this, we held a public debate at MIT’s primary debate hall (Room 10-250), attended by several hundred students. Neither of us was able to win that day, as I did not have enough computation to demonstrate intelligence and he did not have the right algorithms. Yet the connectionist breakthroughs of 2020–2023 have made clear that the amount of computation is key to achieving sufficient intelligence. I started in AI around 1963, and it has taken sixty years to reach this level of computation. The amount of computation used to train a state-of-the-art model is now increasing by about a factor of four each year—and capabilities are rapidly maturing.[125]