---
category: Technologists
created: 2026-09-22
relations:
- fn: 1
  role: co-founder with Peter Thiel and Eliezer Yudkowsky
  start: 2006
  type: founded
  with: '[[Singularity Summit]]'
- fn: 3
  start: 2008-09-20
  type: founded
  with: '[[Singularity University]]'
- fn: 2
  role: director of engineering
  start: 2012-12
  type: employed_by
  with: '[[Google]]'
summary: Inventor and futurist who popularized the technological singularity, co-founded
  the Singularity Summit with Peter Thiel and Eliezer Yudkowsky and Singularity University
  at NASA Ames, and joined Google in 2012.
tags:
- Person
- Singularitarianism
- Transhumanism
- Google
- ArtificialIntelligence
updated: 2026-09-22
---

Ray Kurzweil is an American inventor, author and futurist. In *The Age of Spiritual Machines* (1999) and *The Singularity Is Near* (2005) he popularized the [technological singularity](/concepts/singularitarianism/), the idea, named by Vernor Vinge in 1993, of a point at which machine intelligence outruns human understanding, and set out a "law of accelerating returns" with forecasts for 2029 and 2045.[^1] On December 14, 2012, he announced that Google had hired him as a director of engineering focused on machine learning and language processing.[^2]

### The Singularity Summit and Singularity University

In 2006 [Peter Thiel](/people/peter-thiel/), who had begun funding [Eliezer Yudkowsky](/people/eliezer-yudkowsky/)'s Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence the year before, joined Yudkowsky and Kurzweil in founding the [Singularity Summit](/events/singularity-summit/), first held at Stanford; in December 2012 Singularity University acquired the summit and the institute sold it the "Singularity" name, and the institute became the [Machine Intelligence Research Institute](/organizations/machine-intelligence-research-institute/).[^1] Singularity University was founded on September 20, 2008, at a founders conference hosted by S. Pete Worden, director of the [NASA](/organizations/nasa/) Ames Research Center, by a group that included Kurzweil, the X Prize chairman Peter Diamandis, and Robert Richards and Michael Simpson of the International Space University; NASA later clarified that its personnel were not founders. It was housed at the NASA Research Park at Ames.[^3]

Thiel later turned on the risk wing of the movement: in 2025 he named Yudkowsky one of the "legionnaires of the Antichrist" in a private lecture series.[^4] [Émile P. Torres](/people/émile-p-torres/) and [Timnit Gebru](/people/timnit-gebru/) grouped Kurzweil's singularitarianism with transhumanism, extropianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism and longtermism in their [TESCREAL](/concepts/tescreal/) bundle.[^5]

[^1]: Kurzweil, Ray. *The Age of Spiritual Machines,* 1999; *The Singularity Is Near,* Viking, 2005; Hagey, Keach. *The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future.* W. W. Norton, 2025, on Thiel's funding of the Singularity Institute from 2005 and the 2006 summit; Machine Intelligence Research Institute, "Singularity Summit" archive, https://intelligence.org/singularitysummit/ ; "Singularity Summit 2012 Is Coming To San Francisco October 13-14," *Singularity Hub,* August 29, 2012, and the December 2012 acquisition announcement.
[^2]: Taylor, Colleen. "Ray Kurzweil Joins Google In Full-Time Engineering Director Role; Will Focus On Machine Learning, Language Processing." *TechCrunch,* December 14, 2012. https://techcrunch.com/2012/12/14/ray-kurzweil-joins-google-as-engineering-director-focusing-on-machine-learning-and-language-tech/
[^3]: NASA. "NASA Ames Becomes Home To Newly Launched Singularity University," February 3, 2009, with later clarification. https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-ames-becomes-home-to-newly-launched-singularity-university/
[^4]: "What billionaire Peter Thiel said in his private 'Antichrist lectures.'" *Washington Post,* October 10, 2025. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/10/10/peter-thiel-antichrist-lectures-leaked/
[^5]: Gebru, Timnit, and Émile P. Torres. "The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence." *First Monday* 29, no. 4, April 2024. https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/13636