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At the beginning of 2016, Mark Zuckerberg publicly set himself the challenge of building a piece of artificial intelligence to run his home – an assistant he has just demoed for the first time.
Called Jarvis – inspired by Tony Stark’s AI assistant of the same name in the Iron Man series – the software runs through Zuckerberg’s phone and is controlled by voice; controlling appliances, announcing his schedule, offering prompts and playing music.
Mark Zuckerberg – After a year of coding, here’s Jarvis. | Facebook
As the light-hearted video shows, the premise is very similar to that of Amazon Echo and Google Home, both of which use voice controls picked up by a main speaker or via a smartphone app to carry out various commands related to connected devices, including lights, thermostats and TVs.
Mark Zuckerberg – Priscilla’s experience with Jarvis has… | Facebook
Not to mention throwing shade at Nickelback.
Zuckerberg though has taken things up a notch tech-wise. For one, he has Morgan Freeman as the voice of his assistant (as well as Arnold Schwarzenegger), and can text commands to Jarvis via a messaging app he created.
The software was also able to use the Facebook founder’s door camera and facial recognition to open the front door to the right people.
The billionaire has written extensively about his experience building Jarvis, which you can read in full here.
His conclusion, having spent a year working on the program, was that while AI is fast becoming the computing of the next generation, the way these systems learn entirely new skills still needs work.
“I spent about 100 hours building Jarvis this year, and now I have a pretty good system that understands me and can do lots of things. But even if I spent 1,000 more hours, I probably wouldn’t be able to build a system that could learn completely new skills on its own,” Zuckerberg said.
“In a way, AI is both closer and farther off than we imagine. AI is closer to being able to do more powerful things than most people expect – driving cars, curing diseases, discovering planets, understanding media. Those will each have a great impact on the world, but we’re still figuring out what real intelligence is.”
