During a Facebook Live Q&A today from Rome, Italy, Mark Zuckerberg announced that he’s very close to revealing his much-anticipated A.I. assistant.
Zuckerberg told attendees his JARVIS-inspired A.I., which he pledged to build as one of his New Year’s resolutions, will be unveiled sometime next month.
“I got it to this point where now I can control the lights, I can control the gates, I can control the temperature — much to the chagrin of my wife, who now cannot control the temperature because it is programmed to only listen to my voice,” Zuckerberg said.
In order to design the A.I., Zuckerberg worked with Facebook engineers who are experimenting with advances in speech and face recognition.
“I’ve programmed it now so that [when] I walk up to my gate, I don’t have to put in a code [or] put in a key. It just sees my face and lets me in,” he said. “There’s some state-of-the-art AI in there.”
Though the personal assistant might be a pet project, Zuckerberg didn’t rule out the possibility of making the technology a part of Facebook’s growing portfolio. In an April investors call, Zuckerberg expressed that the company had a strong interest in the future of A.I.
“The thing that we’re focused on with artificial intelligence is building computer systems that have better perception than people,” Zuckerberg told investors at the time. “The basic human senses, like seeing, hearing, and language, is a core thing at what we do. I think it’s possible in the next five to 10 years where we have computer systems that are better than people at each of those things.”
In the talk, he also addressed Facebook’s investment in the future of VR, the future of its “Free Basics” program, and the personalized education software it is currently piloting in over a hundred schools.
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