Science

Mark Zuckerberg's New Year's Resolution Is to Code an AI Assistant

While you try to eat more kale, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will be creating his own AI. 

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images News

Most people make delusional New Year’s resolutions that involve not smoking and binge eating while doing enough burpies to lose those extra pounds they’ve been packing on since Halloween. But not Mark Zuckerberg. The Facebook CEO doesn’t just try to improve his life each year with “personal challenges,” he actually does. Earlier today, he wrote on his own Facebook page that his “theme” for 2016 is invention and his goal is “to build a simple AI to run my home and help me with my work.”

So basically, while you’re eating kale, he’s crafting a robot assistant. 

Zuckerberg starts by noting that in past years he’s done things like “read two books every month, learn Mandarin and meet a new person every day.” But for 2016, he’s leaving paper behind for a mechanical brainiac. “You can think of it kind of like Jarvis in Iron Man,” he writes.

He’ll start by using existing technology and teach the AI voice commands so that it can control everything in his house like the lighting and music (sort of like an iPhone) and recognize his friends’ faces so that it can let them into his home (a robotic Jeeves), and check in on his daughter when he’s not around (like a nannybot). He adds, “On the work side, it’ll help me visualize data in VR to help me build better services and lead my organizations more effectively.”

AI is as trendy right now as DJ Khaled’s Snapchat. Along with other Silicon Valley bigwigs, Elon Musk recently launched OpenAI, a nonprofit that aims to keep technology related to artificial intelligence public and not private. Zuckerberg writes that he already works with engineers at Facebook on other projects like Oculus and Messenger, but this time, he’s going to code a thing himself.

Chances are you’ll be buying his AI for your mom by next Christmas.

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