The David Lin Report · Monday, September 7, 2026
John-Clark Levin, Head of Research at Kurzweil Technologies, predicts that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) could be accessible by 2029, based on the exponential growth of computation price performance. He emphasizes that this timeline relies on the continued trend of doubling computation power every one to two years, a pattern observed since 1939.
“So the core assumption concerns compute scale. So this was a prediction Ray Kurzweil made back in 1999 in a book called The Age of Spiritual Machines, that the rate of doubling of computation price performance, that is calculations per second per inflation-adjusted dollar, was every one to two years that was doubling. And that trend went all the way back to the world's first working programmable computer in Nazi Germany in 1939. And Ray assessed that if that exponential trend continued, we would get access to human scale useful computation at the end of the 2020s, in 2029.”