In 2016, can $1000.00 buy enough operations per second to be approximately equal to the computational power of a human brain?

Question

In The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999), Ray Kurzweil predicted that in 2009, a \$1000 computing device would be able to perform a trillion operations per second. Additionally, he claimed that in 2019, a \$1000 computing device would be approximately equal to the computational ability of the human brain (due to Moore's Law and exponential growth.)

Did Kurzweil's first prediction come true? Are we on pace for his second prediction to come true? If not, how many years off are we?

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Edit (12.19.2020)

According to the answer here, estimates of the processing power of the human brain range at least as widely as from $10^{17}$ flops to $10^{28}$ flops.

Answer 1

The development of CPUs didn't quite keep up with Kurzweil's predictions. But if you also allow for GPUs, his prediction for 2009 is pretty accurate.

I think Moore's law slowed down recently and has now been pretty much abandoned by the industry. How much that will affect the 2019 prediction remains to be seen. Maybe the industry will hit its stride again with non-silicon based chips, maybe not.

And, of course, whether hitting Kurzweil's estimate of the computing power of the human brain will make an appreciable difference for the development of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is another question altogether.

Answer 2

1. Yes, we do have computing systems that do fall in the teraFLOPS range (where 1 teraflop = 1 trillion FLOPS = $10^{12}$ FLOPS)

2. The human brain is a biological system and saying it has some sort of FLOPS ability is just plain dumb because there is no way to take a human brain and measure its FLOPS. You could say "hey, by looking at the neurons activity using fMRI we can reach some sort of approximation", but comparing the result of this approach with the way FLOPS are measured in computers will be comparing apples with oranges, which again is dumb.