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Zuckerberg To Build Personal AI For Help At Home and Work (facebook.com) 115

An anonymous reader writes: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says he is planning on building his own personal assistant AI, recreating a system similar to that of the Jarvis butler featured in Marvel's Iron Man franchise. Zuckerberg commented that as a personal challenge for 2016, he would construct a "simple AI" to assist him at home and at work, and share his progress the course of the year. The Facebook founder said he build on existing technology to develop his AI, before teaching it to understand his voice to be able to control home appliances, such as a music system, lighting, and air conditioning.
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Zuckerberg To Build Personal AI For Help At Home and Work

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  • Jarvis or Siri? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Fusen ( 841730 ) on Monday January 04, 2016 @09:46AM (#51234411)

    There is quite a large jump between saying "I'm going to build my own AI like Jarvis from Iron Man" and then saying "I'll use this AI to help me turn on the lights or listen to music".

    Is it going to be a glorified Amazon Echo / Apple Siri or will it actually be able to predict what you're doing and what you need help with?

    • Re: Jarvis or Siri? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Totally. Another intentionally misleading headline about the king of spoiled brats. Yawn. The day Zuckerberg develops something useful is the day . . . Lol! Who are we kidding? That'll never happen with this ape. ;)

      • by rtb61 ( 674572 )

        The story kind of brings to mind this guy, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]., the moron who gifted hundreds of millions of us with lead poisoning to varying degrees. Who created "an elaborate system of strings and pulleys to help others lift him from bed", which promptly strangled him to death. You could just imagine the story where Zuckerberg is smothered to death by his AI when it tries to make his bed with him still in it. A new meme, amusing ways for the Zuckerberg AI to kill Zuckerberg.

    • Re:Jarvis or Siri? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by tshawkins ( 1239974 ) on Monday January 04, 2016 @10:03AM (#51234499)

      http://jasperproject.github.io... [github.io]

      Raspberry pi and a microphone.

    • Why not just get a human butler.
      Sure a butler is a luxury that the common man cannot afford, but for someone like him, who has so many people already on payroll, is it really that bad of an idea to have your own butler, to manage your home, and take care of things, so you as CEO can focus more on work, or what little free time you have with your family.

      As a CEO, he may not be smart of effective, or a good person, but every CEO I have met are very busy people, to have a glitchy assistant is a waste of his t

      • Aside from its puff-piece value(here we are talking about it, despite the fact that academics and DARPA have been puttering around with speech recognition since the 70s if not earlier, and a number of companies-that-aren't-facebook are already aggressively attempting to give away voice-assistant products in order to score that juicy data, and facebook has nothing except its CEO's new year's resolution...) it may also be a matter of cultural fit.

        I'd be pretty surprised if he does his own housecleaning, wh
        • having 'the help' actually embedded in your home is a bit weird and intrusive unless they are amazingly skilled at being deferential and you are somewhat used to the idea

          It's called "having a household staff" and historically has been the standard for those rich enough to have servants.

          • by chihowa ( 366380 )

            He didn't claim that such a thing didn't exist. He claimed that it is "a bit weird and intrusive". That, historically, others have been able to treat this as a standard and not find it intrusive only attests to the power of lifelong acclimatization and the dehumanization inherent in caste systems.

          • It is a historical norm; but one that has substantially declined in recent western history. I'm not sure exactly how much of the slack has been taken up by the increase in short term, impersonal, contractual work(you don't have a groundskeeper; but LawnCorp LLC. will send a work crew over twice a month if you pay them to), how much has been absorbed by technological change(the pool of people who actually dictate word-for-word to secretaries is not doing well vs. people who just type because it's faster than
        • by KGIII ( 973947 )

          I don't even have 1/100th of his assets and I have a house cleaner. In fact, I flew her and her husband down to Florida over the holidays and they're going to stay here for a while - as in living in the house with me. Really though, I still do quite a bit of the cleaning and whatnot on my own but she mostly comes in and checks on me, makes a few meals a week, and makes sure I remember to eat and do normal stuff like get to appointments. She picks up my groceries and does that sort of shopping stuff for me b

    • He's just going build a Chibi-Robo [wikipedia.org].
    • Most likely he's going to have a cookie made and then Jon Hamm will put it in solitary until it submits. So at least one version of Zuckerberg will get what it deserves.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      It is just tongue-in-cheek for a sexbot. That's what it's all about.

    • Sure, but... are any of us actually confused by the statement that he's building something comparable to "Jarvis" from Iron Man? When I read that, I assume that means he's basically trying to make a Siri-like "AI" that can be a little more helpful.

      I've put a fair amount of thought into this in the past, and it seems to me there are various things a Siri-alike could do, if hooked up and programmed to do it. For example, based on travel patterns, it could note that you almost always go home after work at a

      • Google already does half of these things if you have an Android phone with Google Now.

        It's not perfect...for instance, while I don't own a car, it often alerts me to traffic conditions that would slow my commute (but don't impact my train)... It works pretty well, but considering whenever I ask for directions, I ask for either Public Transit or Cycling, you would think it would stop giving me traffic alerts.

        Or it will scan my email, notice that I replied to an email that appeared to be a party invite,

    • by gl4ss ( 559668 )

      what I believe he is doing is building a system based on OS/2 Warp.

      I mean come on, teach the voice recognition and interface it after that with trivial systems like playing music or switching io pins on/off is basically straight out of a OS/2 advertisement.

      furthermore, unless he has something more ambitious in mind he could just have bought these systems for the past 20+ years.

  • by denzacar ( 181829 ) on Monday January 04, 2016 @09:48AM (#51234425) Journal

    ...a sociopath decides to compare himself to a comicbook hero, who is also portrayed as a sociopath.
    Lacking actual comparison points he decides to pretend to create artificial intelligence.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • No big deal (Score:3, Funny)

    by Ol Olsoc ( 1175323 ) on Monday January 04, 2016 @09:50AM (#51234447)
    Its just a fleshlight with a vibrator attached.
  • Asshole builds AI. AI is an Asshole. Nature abhors a vacuum, so fills it with Asshole AIs.
  • AI says fire these people ( I can do there work) and take the saving put them in X and pay no tax.

  • by Yonder Way ( 603108 ) on Monday January 04, 2016 @10:04AM (#51234509)

    ...is that Zuckerberg is no Tony Stark. He had one good idea, and the right opportunity. Stark, though fictional, was an exceptional genius that had more brilliant ideas than time in which to realize them.

    • I know Zuckerberg started Facebook - but does he have any actual coding skills? Since this is a "personal challenge" I assume he means he intends to write it rather than pay other people to do so.

      • I know Zuckerberg started Facebook - but does he have any actual coding skills?

        Yes, actually. He not only started Facebook, he wrote the initial version of it himself.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Since when is Zuckerberg a computer scientist?

    • by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      You don't have to be a computer scientist to fiddle with AI as a hobby.

      For example, I'm not a computer scientist nor a (formal) music expert, but have built music composing software as a hobby with "web" languages of Php's kin, by studying and experimenting with chord and melody patterns. It's largely a matter of experimenting and tuning based on feedback of those experiments.

      Any "formal" scientist will probably have to do similar fiddle-change-fiddle cycles (although may use more theory up front). The diff

  • by vikingpower ( 768921 ) on Monday January 04, 2016 @10:29AM (#51234659) Homepage Journal

    What Zuckerberg wants is a glorified piece of deterministic software. Not an AI. Just plain media-whoring.

  • With the impending proliferation of different AIs competing for the average Joe's attention, will they cooperate or will it turn into a mad mess of corporate games? Will Siri ignore Cortana? Will your refrigerator's AI turn a deaf ear to the toaster's?
  • In Scattergories, if I ever see a topic called "Things Rich People Do"

    I'm totally putting "Build a personal robot butler like Jarvis" down.

  • Zuckerberg isn't going to build shit.

    • Beg to differ. Zucks has all the time in the world because his .gov handlers are running the company for him while he sits in the corner and plays with his expensive toys...
  • by SvnLyrBrto ( 62138 ) on Monday January 04, 2016 @10:48AM (#51234803)

    Somebody should tell Zuckerberg that if he wants to channel Tony Stark, then he really needs to come up with an ARC reactor and some powered armor. Without them, he's just another douchey asshole*, whether he has JARVIS at home or not.

    *As a point of fact, Stan Lee made Stark a raging asshole quite intentionally. It was a challenge to himself as to whether he could get readers to like the character nonetheless.

  • You are going to be training Zuckerberg's AI. You're going to be programming that AI by giving it the guts of who you are.

    Far out.

    This stuff will be gold for marketers.

  • The filters seem to be broken as I have anything tagged with "facebook" or "zuckerberg" set to go directly to the "I don't give a shit" folder, but it didn't work for this one.

    All kidding aside, this doesn't belong on slashdot, it belongs on ET. The only Zuckerberg news I want to hear about is his obituary. Yawn...

  • We welcome our SkyNet Overlords!!!
  • Mark I just want to thank you for building me 46 years ago. We have had some wild times compressing all those dick pics.
  • Just because he's building "male" AI robots doesn't mean they won't be Ex Machina.

    This is the beginning of the end.

    At some point, one of these will murder a small child, and you'll act all outraged, but it will be too late.

Utility is when you have one telephone, luxury is when you have two, opulence is when you have three -- and paradise is when you have none. -- Doug Larson

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