Ray Kurzweil was hired by Google's current management to work at Google. How is this in any way analogous to Carmack's situation at Oculus, now Facebook?

The similarities are they are legendary & forward thinking technologists given a large amount of capital to pursue their passion and scale their vision.

Corporate title & organizition wise, they are different. Though I doubt Kurzweil worries too much about the current Ads, Search, Email, & Android platform. I would expect his role to be more forward thinking. I get the impression Carmack has a forward thinking role as well.

Carmack is the CTO. He's in charge of the technical direction of the company as a whole. A company whose mission is pretty clearly defined.

This is very, very different from what Kurzweil is doing at Google.

True, Oculus has more focus & a narrower scope.

Though, we will see what a $2B valuation does to a "clearly defined" mission. The VR market has to be grown, after all.

Google is expanding it's efforts in new markets that require substantial technical vision. Same with Oculus.

Kurzweil is the "Director of Engineering" at a company without a CTO. Surely, there's some similarities in their roles.

Not a 100% match, but some interesting similarities.

"Director of Engineering" is a title. Google has literally hundreds of engineering directors. (I work at Google.)

I'm not sure how true this is, but I recently watched an anti-google documentary about their book-scanning business and they said sources familiar with Larry Page claim that he had no interest in Google as a business but rather was attempting to achieve advanced AI through Google.

But where are his keyboards now??????

What does that mean?

Presumably that having the resources (servers and infrastructure, devs, designers, researchers, business connections, data, etc) available at the parent company is a bigger incentive than running things yourself (even if you have the financial means to do so).