Have you read Ray's books? I recommend 2005's The Singularity is Near. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Near
So, how "near" was the singularity in 2005? How accurate was Kurzweil?
As far as I can tell for decades he's been consistently more right than his critics and often on issues that are a lot harder to get right than simple coin tosses.
And yes, there's evidence of incredible machine learning discoveries all around us. You'd have to be willfully blind not to see those. AlphaZero in Go & Chess, the protein folding miracles of Deepmind, all the amazing work being done today. The field is racing ahead. Human minds are good at seeing linear progression. Our brains aren't particularly good at exponential growth, which is what is happening in this field.
As the parent poster said, there is zero reason to take him seriously.
the first CCD flat-bed scanner
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 a grand piano
But what has he invented after he started writing about the singularity?