For those that don't know, Kurzweil wrote a book called The Age of Spiritual Machines more than 20 years ago. In it, he said that we would have computers that are smarter than humans by 2029, and computers that are smarter than all of humanity combined by 2045. At the time, that seemed crazy. Today, it doesn't seem all the crazy. He's also got a new book coming out called The Singularity is Nearer. Interestingly, he seems very skeptical of quantum computing. He says you need a quantum computer of at least 1,000 qubits to get 1 reliable qubit. All his predictions are based extrapolation of conventional computing.
Intelligence is essentially about pattern recognition. Before the asteroids hit, only mouse-like creatures had a neocortex. It was the size of a postage stamp. But this tiny little neocortex allowed them to alter their behavior within 1 generation, what we call "learning". Dinosaurs, since they didn't have a neocortex, couldn't alter their behavior within one generation. They weren't capable of learning. and so something as simple as "don't touch the lava" led to the extinction of dinosaurs, and nature continued to reward the neocortex (a pattern recognition machine) ever since. What tends to happen with more intelligence (neurons in the neocortex for biological life) is that you get emergent properties. It's not such about being able to get more bananas, but you get completely new faculties. For example, language and math. These large language models have improved (and developed completely new properties) not through new algorithms, but primarily through more computing power.
