Every year Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg picks one “personal challenge” to tackle outside of his work devoted to the social network.
In the past these have included reading two books every month, learning Mandarin and meeting a new person every day.
In a Facebook post, Zuckerberg has revealed his challenge for 2016: to build his own personal AI house butler.
“My personal challenge for 2016 is to build a simple AI to run my home and help me with my work,” Zuckerberg says in the post.
“You can think of it kind of like Jarvis in Iron Man.”
While it may seem a daunting task, Zuckerberg has also clearly outlined how he hopes to achieve this mission. He’ll be starting off by leveraging the existing technology on offer, before teaching the system his voice to control the music, lights and temperature in his house.
Eventually, Zuckerberg hopes for the AI system to be able to let friends into his home using facial recognition, check on his young daughter in her room and visualise his work data in virtual reality.
He says the theme for this yearly challenge is “invention”.
“At Facebook I spend a lot of time working with engineers to build new things,” Zuckerberg says.
“Some of the most rewarding work involves getting deep into the details of technical projects. But it’s a different kind of rewarding to build things yourself, so this year my personal challenge is to do that.
Artificial intelligence is an area that Facebook is also taking a keen interest in, recently launching a virtual Messenger assistant combining AI technology with human knowledge.
Denham Sadler is a former editor of StartupSmart. He was previously a journalist at the publication and has worked as a freelancer for the Guardian, the Saturday Paper and the ABC. In his spare time he likes puns and jaffles.
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