Mark Zuckerberg professed his drive to create an AI akin to J.A.R.V.I.S., Tony Stark’s personal assistant in Iron Man, at the start of the year. In a matter of months, it seems the Facebook founder is well on his way to achieving that goal.
In a new interview, Zuckerberg reveals that his AI butler now lets him control his entire home and also makes him breakfast. “That’s actually easy,” he states.
“It’s going well … I have it to the point where I can control everything in the house. It can control the lights, the temperature, the doors. It can make me toast,” Zuckerberg tells The Verge.
In fact, breakfast is crucial to the specific domestic concerns that Zuck claims he is in the process of fine-tuning. “The real question is not how it makes me toast,” says Zuckerberg. “The more challenging AI problem, is when to make me toast.”
For an individual who is committed to delivering internet to the developing world, it seems that Zuckerberg still suffers from first world problems like the rest of us. Only ours involve devising ways to skip work in order to play Pokémon Go, rather than creating a comprehensive AI servant to manage our lives.
Zuckerberg goes on to elaborate on how his machine learning system will eventually be able to work out exactly when to make him breakfast.
“In the morning I’m writing all these emails, and I go for a run, and my meetings start at different times, and so I’ve built this whole thing which figures out from where I am — Am I out? Am I on a run? — when’s the right time to [make me toast] and then tell me. That still needs some work, but all the stuff is working.”
Zuck claims that he is learning how to build AI tools from the Facebook Messenger team, which is hard at work introducing thousands of bots to the platform (including Facebook’s very own digital assistant for its users).
“The bot framework that the Messenger team is building has been really cool. If I hadn’t done this home AI project, I probably wouldn’t have had a reason to get into the code on those, which now I have,” states the Facebook CEO. “Even if I’m asking sometimes silly questions, I know more of the people, and I use more of the code.”
Zuckerberg also references the facial and object recognition tech that Facebook uses to power Moments, its photo-sharing tool. We know from one of his January Facebook posts that those specific tools will be essential to the second part of his personal AI project: recognizing who is at his front door and letting them in — which is not at all creepy.
We’re sure Zuckerberg will keep everyone in the loop on his rather, very intelligent smart butler, and its breakfast-making skills. He’s already promising to demo it “soon.” Judging from his fondness for live-streams, we wouldn’t be surprised if he shows it off to the world on Facebook Live.
