Mark Zuckerberg’s personal challenge for 2016 is building an AI for his home

Published On: Mon, Jan 4th, 2016

Technology | By admin

He’s learned Mandarin, read two books every month, and accomplished many of his resolutions from previous years. So what’s the next challenge for Mark Zuckerberg?

In a post on the social network, Facebook’s chief executive wrote that it’s all about “invention” and he’s going to take it to heart by building an artificial intelligence system for his home that would function akin to “Jarvis”, the automated servant of Tony Stark in the Iron Man series.

Zuckerberg won’t be spending countless hours slaving away at building a whole new platform. He’s going about it using the most efficient way possible: leveraging existing technology. From there, he said he’ll “start teaching it to understand my voice to control everything in our home — music, lights, temperature, and so on.”

When fully built and implemented, he hopes that the AI can be programmed to recognize his friends faces at the door and automatically let them in, or notify either him or his wife about anything going on in his daughter’s room.

In the replies of his post, Zuckerberg did remark that he’s contemplating setting up a development area on Amazon Web Services or using Facebook’s infrastructure. Obviously he’s leaning towards the latter as “the Facebook environment gets me access to all of the great stuff the Facebook AI research team has worked on.” Oh, and it’ll likely incorporate some tech from Oculus.

He has been using the Amazon Echo in his home to control music, but it’s limiting for him right now since he only has one. It’s not the ideal solution for him, but it’s a starting point. Zuckerberg said another focus for having an AI platform is to use voice and face recognition to set lights and the temperature depending on who’s in the room.

While some tech luminaries are concerned about the rise of artificial intelligence, Zuckerberg isn’t shying away from it. He explained: “I think we can build AI so it works for us and helps us. Some people fear-monger about how AI is a huge danger, but that seems far-fetched to me and much less likely than disasters due to widespread disease, violence, etc.”

“This should be a fun intellectual challenge to code this for myself,” Zuckerberg explained. He’ll most likely be posting updates about his journey throughout the year, similar to his book challenge from 2015.