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Moonshots · 4 min · Jan 20, 2026

Kurzweil expects interviewable personal avatars this year

Ray Kurzweil says an avatar built from his books and writing could answer interview questions and remember more than he does. He expects fuller computational reconstructions of people to take longer.

RK

Ray Kurzweil

Ray Kurzweil is an inventor and futurist.

  • Peter Diamandis, Host · Founder & executive chairman, XPRIZE Foundation

    Co-founded Singularity University and founded Zero-G; co-wrote the books Abundance and Bold.

  • Salim Ismail, Host · Founder, OpenExO

    Co-wrote Exponential Organizations; was Singularity University's founding executive director; sold Ångströ to Google.

  • Dave Blundin, Host · Founder & GP, Link Ventures

    Has co-founded 23 companies; founding CEO of Vestmark and chairman of insurance marketplace EverQuote.

  • Alexander Wissner-Gross, Host · Computer Scientist & Founder, Reified

    Has backed and advised 40+ tech companies, directly and through 021T Capital and Reified; writes The Innermost Loop.

About this segment

Ray Kurzweil says an avatar built from his books and writing could answer interview questions and remember more than he does. He expects fuller computational reconstructions of people to take longer.

From “The Singularity Countdown: AGI by 2029, Humans Merge with AI, Intelligence 1000x | Ray Kurzweil”, Jan 20, 2026. Watch the full episode

Answers “What will AI look like in the next few years?” See all 70 answers

“The avatar is actually better than me because it will remember everything. I don't remember everything that I've said.”
RKRay Kurzweilat 34:47 · Moonshots34:47

Takeaways

  1. He has 11 books and hundreds of articles to train an avatar on.
  2. He expects his own interviewable avatar this year.
  3. Reconstructing a person more completely may be 10 to 15 years away.

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 36:17Kurzweil expects longevity escape velocity by 20325:35
  2. 12:52AGI means expertise across fields, not a Turing test4:19

  3. 33:01Kurzweil expects interviewable personal avatars this year3:38

  4. 4 more moments in the full episode
Up next · The Peterman PodBuild for the model that will exist six months from now2:28

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 33:13

    You've been very public about keeping, maintaining lots of documents, lots of artifacts from your father, whom I gather was tremendous influence on your life, with the premise that AI is going to enable you to basically computationally reconstruct your father someday, if I'm not misconstruing. there is a related notion that has been called variously quantum archaeology or humanity's final task. Tsiol Kolsky has written or had written extensively about this in the context of Russian cosmism. Question for you, when do we get the ability to computationally resurrect dead human beings with AI? Well, I mean, prior to that, we're trying to create avatars of ourselves uh we did create one of my father uh and i'm like creating now an avatar of myself i have actually a lot more uh material that we can uh put into text i have 11 books i've got

  2. 34:27

    several hundred articles that i've written articles about me all of this to go into a large language model, we'll create something that can talk like me and it will look like me. And like, I get probably five to 10 requests for interviews and podcasts a day, and I can't do most of them. So I'll actually offer them, you can interview the avatar. The avatar is actually better than me because it will remember everything.

  3. 35:04

    I don't remember everything that I've said. So the avatar will actually be better, and you can interview the avatar as long as you want. In whatever language? You can do it in another language, right? And that'll be this year, so... What age are you going to make yourself in your avatar? Kind of an arbitrary choice you have to make. Yeah. Now, that's not actually creating everything about me or my father, which we have actually less material of his, although we have enough to create an avatar that's also lively.

  4. 35:55

    Being able to relate everything that a person has and the state of their bodies and so on. That will happen eventually, but that's probably another 10 or 15 years away. Do you view that as the killer app of the singularity, the so-called great task of resurrecting computationally with AI every human who has ever existed? That's one of them, yeah.