Ray Kurzweil is a world-class inventor, thinker, and futurist with a 36-year track record of accurate predictions. A leader in artificial intelligence for 63 years, he was the principal inventor of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition software.

Ray has won a Grammy, the National Medal of Technology, a place in the National Inventors Hall of Fame, and 21 honorary doctorates. He has written six bestselling books including The Singularity Is Near, How to Create a Mind, and The Singularity Is Nearer, which debuted at #4 on the New York Times Best Seller list.

He served as a director of engineering and later principal researcher and AI visionary at Google for 13 years where he developed an AI model that conversed in natural language with 100,000 books, a landmark precursor to today's large language models.