Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t plan on resting on his laurels in 2016 and is setting his sights on building an AI – artificial intelligence robot.

Mark Zuckerberg’s AI

Facebook founder Zuckerberg comes up with personal challenges for himself every year, challenges that involve matters outside the realm of his social media platform. After conquering Mandarin and reading two books a month in past years, Zuckerberg is tackling an AI project for 2016.

“My personal challenge for 2016 is to build a simple AI to run my home and help me with my work. You can think of it kind of like Jarvis in Iron Man,” Zuckerberg explained in a Facebook Post. “I’m going to start by exploring what technology is already out there. Then I’ll start teaching it to understand my voice to control everything in our home — music, lights, temperature and so on.”

“I’ll teach it to let friends in by looking at their faces when they ring the doorbell. I’ll teach it to let me know if anything is going on in Max’s room that I need to check on when I’m not with her,” Zuckerberg added. “On the work side, it’ll help me visualize data in VR to help me build better services and lead my organizations more effectively.”

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Zuckerberg continued, “It’s a different kind of rewarding to build things yourself, so this year my personal challenge is to do that. This should be a fun intellectual challenge to code this for myself. I’m looking forward to sharing what I learn over the course of the year.”

True to his word, Zuckerberg has already shared an update about his AI project, revealing that the team of people working on it have already gotten a start on helping computers see and understand.

“We recently built a prototype that combines language and vision comprehension so it can answer questions about an image,” Zuckerberg wrote Wednesday. “We’re using AI to help blind people in our community experience their friends’ photos by having our systems describe the scenes. I’m also doing my own personal challenge to build a simple AI to help run my home and help with my work. This is an area I’m personally very interested in long term.”

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