The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

by Ray Kurzweil

As a personal example, when I attended MIT in 1965, the school was so advanced that it actually had computers. The most notable of them, an IBM 7094, had 150,000 bytes of “core” storage and a quarter of a MIPS (million instructions per second) of computing speed. It cost $3.1 million (in 1963 dollars, which is $30 million in 2023 dollars) and was shared by thousands of students and professors.[205] By comparison, the iPhone 14 Pro, released while this book was being written, cost $999 and could achieve up to 17 trillion operations per second for AI-related applications.[206] This is not a perfect comparison—part of the iPhone’s cost includes features irrelevant to the 7094, like cameras, and the iPhone’s speed is significantly slower than that figure for many uses—but the overall point is clear. At least roughly, the iPhone is 68 million times faster than the 7094 and less than one 30,000th the cost. In terms of price-performance (speed per dollar), this is a staggering two-trillion-fold improvement.