Ray Kurzweil

By around 2019 a $1,000 PC will perform about 20 million billion calculations per second (20 petaflops), the estimated raw capacity of the human brain.

“But 200 calculations a second times a hundred trillion-fold parallelism is about 20 million billion calculations per second, or about 20 billion mips. And we'll achieve that in a thousand dollar PC or equivalent by around 2019.”

Said on

1 August 1999 · Moderated discussion with Kip Crosby, moderated by Michael S. Malone, from a Forbes / Nightline interview; the transcript page dates it to about August 1999 (approximate). His book the same year put this at $4,000 in 2019 and $1,000 later.

Source

Moderated Discussion · Forbes / ABC Nightline (transcript hosted by PPPL)

Should come true

2019

How sure they sounded

we'll achieve that

Categories

TechnologyAI

Importance

3 of 5 · Brain-scale compute in a consumer PC would be a major milestone for computing and AI.

Outcome

Inaccurate

The top consumer GPU in 2019, Nvidia's RTX 2080 Ti (about $1,000-1,200 for the card alone), delivered about 13 teraflops FP32 and roughly 100+ teraflops on tensor cores, far below 20 petaflops. A $1,000 PC in 2019 was over 100x short, even on the most generous measure.

Evidence:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_20_series