Ray Kurzweil On Acceleration

Ray Kurzweil is a very, very interesting man with a long history of success in innovation. Much of that work has centered on recognizing patterns. There are many great biographies out there about Ray so I won't attempt to recreate them here. The reason I write about him today is his emergence as a hedge fund manager. This revelation shouldn't be surprising as it seems everyone is trying to become a hedge fund manager these days. But somehow, with Kurzweil, it actually makes sense. His background in innovation and pattern recognition should help him deliver the returns he has promised his investors. Here is an excerpt from the aptly named Fortune Magazine article "The Smartest (and Nuttiest) Futurist on Earth" by Brian O'Keefe:

If you went around saying that in a couple of decades we'll have cell-sized, brain-enhancing robots circulating through our bloodstream or that we'll be able to upload a person's consciousness into a computer, people would probably question your sanity. But if you say things like that and you're Ray Kurzweil, you get invited to dinner at Bill Gates' house - twice - so he can pick your brain for insights on the future of technology. The Microsoft chairman calls him a "visionary thinker and futurist."

Kurzweil is an inventor whose work in artificial intelligence has dazzled technological sophisticates for four decades. He invented the flatbed scanner, the first true electric piano, and large-vocabulary speech-recognition software; he's launched ten companies and sold five, and has written five books; he has a BS in computer science from MIT and 13 honorary doctorates (but no real one); he's been inducted into the Inventor's Hall of Fame and charges $25,000 every time he gives a speech - 40 times last year.

And now, if anything, he's gaining momentum as a cultural force: He has not one but two movies in the works - one a documentary about his career and ideas and the other an adaptation of his recent bestseller, The Singularity Is Near, which he's writing and co-producing (he's talking about a distribution deal with the people who brought you "The Day After Tomorrow").

When Kurzweil isn't giving keynote addresses or reading obscure peer-review journals, he's raising money for his new hedge fund, FatKat (Financial Accelerating Transactions from Kurzweil Adaptive Technologies). He's already attracted a roster of blue-ribbon investors that includes venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, former Microsoft CFO Mike Brown, and former Flextronics-CEO-turned-KKR-partner Michael Marks.

Being a hedge fund manager may seem an odd pursuit for an expert in AI, but to Kurzweil it's perfectly natural. The magic that has enabled all his innovations has been the science of pattern recognition - and what is the financial market, he postulates, but a series of patterns?

You can check out Kurzweil's Fat Kat Hedge fund website here. You can also watch an incredibly interesting video of Kurzweil speaking at the 2005 Ted Conference below: