Mark Zuckerberg Has Built A Personal AI Assistant Called Jarvis

Each year, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and founder of Facebook, sets himself an ambitious task for the twelve months ahead.

In recent years, he has committed to read two books a month, learn Mandarin and meet a new person each day.

But this year’s task is among the most challenging yet – build an AI butler like Jarvis from Iron Man.

In a blog posted last night, Zuckerberg revealed that he completed the task in just 100 hours – less time than it took him to run 365 miles.

Jarvis can control many aspects of Zuckerberg’s home, including the lights, heating, AC, appliances, music and security.

He even developed a food dispenser for the family dog Beast and a t-shirt cannon that fires out his iconic grey t-shirts on request.

The system works on voice commands via an iOS app and text commands via a chatbot hosted in Facebook Messenger.

Many home assistants, including Google Home and Amazon Echo, rely on speech commands.

But Zuckerberg said that he thought text commands would ultimately prove more popular.

“One thing that surprised me about my communication with Jarvis is that when I have the choice of either speaking or texting, I text much more than I would have expected,” Zuckerberg wrote.

“This is for a number of reasons, but mostly it feels less disturbing to people around me.”

Zuckerberg said we’re closer and further to real AI than he’d imagined. “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.”