I'd like to hear people's opinions on the legitimacy of Ray Kurzweil's contributions to AI. His early OCR and text-to-speech synthesis work has been labeled as seminal and won him many awards. Moreover, he claims to have 'pioneered' Hidden Markov Models and champions them as still the best model for the brain's hierarchical representations (source, around 33 minutes in). However, I've never seen him cited in any serious technical literature. I gather that most of his influence is isolated to futurism, and even that facet of his work has been often criticized, most notably by Paul Allen and John Rennie. But then again, Google hired him as a VP of Engineering--where I assume he is doing something more substantial than meditating all day on how Google's ad revenue will withstand the impending singularity--so they must stand to gain something from his talents. I'm just confused as to what it is. I don't see him leading any front of modern AI. Thoughts?
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