Real Alpha
Watch modeSubscribed

Moonshots · 2 min · Oct 24, 2024

Larry Page offered to buy Kurzweil's startup outright

Ray Kurzweil recounts how Larry Page turned down a venture investment in Patterns and offered to buy it instead. The startup had begun only two weeks earlier.

RK

Ray Kurzweil

Ray Kurzweil is an inventor, AI researcher 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.

About this segment

Ray Kurzweil recounts how Larry Page turned down a venture investment in Patterns and offered to buy it instead. The startup had begun only two weeks earlier.

From “The Man Who Predicted AGI Decades Ago w/ Ray Kurzweil | EP #125”, Oct 24, 2024. Watch the full episode

“I don't want to make a venture investment. That's ridiculous.”
RKRay Kurzweilat 5:28 · Moonshots5:28

Takeaways

  1. Page rejected the proposed venture investment.
  2. He offered to buy Patterns instead.
  3. Page cited Google's compute and data as reasons to bring it in-house.

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 20:00Computing power keeps accelerating across hardware and software4:32
  2. 27:02Automation will displace jobs before creating new kinds of work4:18
  3. 42:50Kurzweil expects longevity escape velocity around 20325:41
  4. 52:18Simulations could compress early drug discovery to days2:51
  5. 36:25Brain-to-cloud links may not need molecular nanomachines3:34
  6. 40:21AI-designed proteins could help target cancer cells2:36

  7. 4:05Larry Page offered to buy Kurzweil's startup outright2:24

  8. 12:44Kurzweil has held to his 2029 AGI forecast since 19992:37Up next

Transcript

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

  1. 4:09

    which is the most important you know uh except it's actually coming true so it it is you know for there's a few interesting facts people should know you know you and i co-founded singularity university and abundance 360 um i got you your first job i don't think people know that uh which is kind of funny um at google you mean yeah i mean you had written this book how to make a mind and then you and then you invited me to help you to join your and we introduced that to Larry Page yeah you so you I came I joined your board in that company and you were saying let's raise I think we were trying to raise 50 million or something like that and you had not met Larry at that point and I said listen Larry's become a friend on my board at XPRIZE I can I'm happily to introduce you.

  2. 5:00

    And so I reached out to Larry and he said, yeah, I'd love to meet Ray. And I remember the meeting, I remember the conference room. So you and I walk in there and you launch into presenting the company. What was the company called back then? Do you remember? Patterns. Yeah, Patterns Inc. That's right. And why don't you recount what happened when you started presenting patterns to Larry? Well, I thought it might be useful if he had made a venture investment in it.

  3. 5:32

    And he said, I don't want to make a venture investment. That's ridiculous. So I said, okay, well, not everybody you approach is going to be interested. He said, I'll just buy the company. I remember him saying, we have so much compute and so much data here. Why would you want to do Patterns Inc. outside of the company? Right. And I said, okay, but we just started two weeks ago. We haven't really done anything.

  4. 5:56

    And he said, well, is it worth anything? I said, well, yeah, I wouldn't ask you to invest if it wasn't worth anything. He said, okay, so I'll buy it. And then you said, well, how would you value it? And then I remember him saying, we can value anything. Right, that's right. Yeah, it was fun. And that's how you got your first job. That's right. I'm still there. Yeah, you are. What's your title at Google these days?

  5. 6:23

    Principal Research AI Visionary.