Maybe we could help Mark with his project, I emailed him some info a while back!
Mark Zuckerberg has christened 2016 Year of the Bot with his latest, remarkably ambitious goal for the year: he wants to build personalized artificial intelligence software to run his household.
Comparing it to a digital butler like Iron Man’sJarvis, Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post last night that he’ll first teach the software to understand his voice to “control everything” in our home, including music, lights and temperature. It sounds like much of the service will revolve around video cameras that can monitor and recognize important changes in the environment, and faces in particular. Among its future tasks:
- Recognize the faces of friends at the door to let them in.
- Watch and recognize for any changes in the room of Zuckerberg’s infant daughter.
- Use facial recognition to set the temperature of a room based on a person’s personal preference. Zuckerberg points out that he prefers rooms colder than his wife does, (showing that the couple-thermostat wars extend to even the most powerful households).
Zuckerberg asked commenters on his Facebook page for ideas to name the new software and said he’d be posting an update on his progress about once a month.
One of his commenters helped raise an important point by asking if Zuckerberg needed help setting up his “sandbox,” or the software environment in which he would be creating the code for his software
“Thanks buddy!” Zuckerberg replied. “I’m still deciding between using the Facebook environment and AWS.”
Here Zuckerberg was referring to Amazon’s popular cloud hosting service; typically, AI and machine learning software are run on large clusters of machines rather than a single computer.
Zuckerberg added that the Facebook environment “gets me access to all of the great stuff the Facebook AI research team has worked on, so I’ll probably do that.”
I’m doubtful that Zuckerberg seriously considered using AWS, given the benefits of drawing on Facebook’s ongoing AI research and the risks of hosting valuable technology on a competitor’s servers.
Not only that, if his digital butler ends up working exceptionally well, hosting its code on Facebook’s servers would make it much easier to outsource it to a team of programmers at Facebook who could commercialize it for the public.
Think about that for a minute.
Some of the world’s biggest tech companies, including Apple, Google and Amazon, have made expensive moves into the business of the smart home, or so-called Internet of Things. Apple released its HomeKit platform, Google bought the smart thermostat maker Nest for $3.2 billion and Amazon recently launched a version of AWS (Amazon Web Services) for processing data from Internet-connected devices like cars and tractors.
So far the biggest move Facebook has made in this space is inviting software developers to build their services on Parse, a mobile platform that shares data between apps and web-connected devices like smart locks, light bulbs and garage-door openers. Facebook bought Parse in 2013 and it is a direct competitor to Apple’s HomeKit.
Facebook hasn’t done much more beyond this. Since buying and launching Parse, its bigger focus seems to have been be on upgrading Facebook Messenger with an artificial intelligence service called M, work that Zuckerberg will no doubt draw on for his own pet project.
Yet being in the smart home business could really benefit Facebook’s business in the long run. Its current advertising base would pay much more for deeper insights into what Facebook users are watching on TV, how much electricity they’re using or when and how often they’re driving, if Facebook could gather data on our other devices.
Right now, it’s hard to imagine people being comfortable with giving Facebook access to that kind of data, more so than they would be with Google or Apple.
One day though, Facebook may want to launch such a digital butler for the home, something that acts as an extension to the digital butler it’s already building for the smartphone. If it does, then marketing it as something that was built and tested by its young, generous founder in his own home seems like a smart way to gain people’s trust.
Zuckerberg’s announcement in full:
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