It's been a few months since noted author, futurist and AI guru Ray Kurzweil joined Google, and Singularity Hub has interviewed him to catch up on how his machine learning projects are going thus far. While Kurzweil said his projects haven't progressed too far at this point, he did reveal some details on how he ended up at Google in the first place. Following the release of How To Create a Mind last summer, Larry Page approached Kurzweil and used the appeal of Google's massive resources to recruit him. "I wanted to do a project and start a company based on [the ideas in my book]," Kurzweil said, "and [Page] convinced me to do it at Google, because the resources I would need are at Google."

Specifically, Kurzweil is getting a lot out of Google's massive Knowledge Graph in his quest to get computers to understand natural human language. "The Knowledge Graph, which has 700 million different concepts and billions of relationships between those concepts... that's something you need to do what I'm doing at Google, which is understanding natural language. That's not something you can create on your own," Kurzweil said. He remarked that he's wanted to build a machine smart enough to pass the Turing Test, but "now, for the first time, I have the resources to do it."