How Ray Kurzweil Plans To Revolutionize Search At Google

All grand plans indeed ... but a higher priority should be making search even work at all.<p>Google search returns approximate results, related results, results with your words split (or joined) and other nonsense to drive ad views.<p>Even using the so-called "power tools" like allinsite: and the (barely functional) quotation marks, you still get very shoddy results.<p>Anyone who ever searches for very specific groups of terms knows exactly what I am talking about: enter search terms, click on result, search in page for term, doesn't exist.

Douglas Hofstadter once said of Ray Kurzweil and his grand ideas: <i>"It's an intimate mixture of rubbish and good ideas, and it's very hard to disentangle the two, because these are smart people; they're not stupid."</i><p>I think Google (and Larry Page) is betting that they will be able to separate out this mixture.

I'm working on some open source projects that pertain to recognizing entailment in plain text. Entailment is the relation that holds when one text "follows from" another.<p>For example, "Carolina beat Duke" follows from "Carolina defeated the Duke Blue Devils once again". I have a demo here: <a href="http://ec2-23-22-22-135.compute-1.amazonaws.com:8001/demo" rel="nofollow">http://ec2-23-22-22-135.compute-1.amazonaws.com:8001/demo</a><p>Here's an example app that uses entailment recognition to answer natural language polar (yes or no) questions: gavinmh.github.io/HelloTablet.<p>I'd be happy to talk to anyone who is interested in getting involved.

&#62;<i>How Ray Kurzweil Plans To Revolutionize Search At Google</i><p>By rigorous hand-waving, as he mostly does things the last 1-2 decades?

Is it just me, or does Ray Kurzweil seem to be getting younger? I remember seeing a speech of his a few years ago, he had a nervous tick where he was blinking his eyes constantly. He also looked a lot older. Now, he doesn't have that tick, seems to have more hair, etc.<p>I know he takes like 100 pills every day

Call me paranoid, but this has to be the mashup best suited to produce Skynet.

while Wolfram said that the bottom-up approach is the new kind of science

I wonder what would be the best strategy for google to monetize such an asset as ibm watson? Surely ads based model is not the best way(since they've already got a large part of the internet ad market and given that only google, ibm and maybe microsoft could build something similar.<p>If it's a truly competitive advantage, wouldn't offering it for startups/other-businesses in return for equity would offer bigger profits?

I think Google Books project provides an interesting twist on this. Now their AI not only has the whole content of the publicly accessible Internet to study but also quite nice chunk of material ever put on paper.

&#62;Kurzweil eventually wants to help create a “cybernetic friend” that knows what you want before you do<p>I am not sure I want that. At least not as much as Google does. Kurzweil is going to help me click on more ads. Shreds any sense of him being a visionary.

Every time I read about machine learning work that is being done at Google, that's available if you're a Real Googler, and then compare that to the closed-allocation nightmare the other 90% face, it makes me want to fucking rage out and fly a plane into Mountain View...<p>... land, get off that plane, take a cab, and have a polite but blunt conversation with the founders about how to fix their company. (What did you think I meant?)<p>Artificial intelligence is nice, brahs, but natural stupidity in the form of closed allocation and Enron-style performance reviews are putting that company at 10% speed. Clear out the latter and you'll have plenty more muscle for the former.<p>I'm sure Ray Kurzweil will do amazing things, but he'd do even <i>more</i> amazing things if the company still had the machinery (e.g. open allocation, a culture of human decency) to bring talent to him properly. The whole reason he is there is to work with great people that the company is supposed to be better equipped to find than he is... but how will that work, given that the company sold off its ability to reward and recognize talent just to appease McKinsey?

Kurzweil has grand ideas, thinks out of the box enough for people to call him crazy. I would guess some of those are the kind of grand / crazy ideas larry and company want to pursue too. So i think it is a good fit. For more information on the man and what motivates him. See the documentary the Transcendent Man, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Transcendent-Man/dp/B0051Y6NQA" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Transcendent-Man/dp/B0051Y6NQA</a>