Facebook creator/CEO/overlord Mark Zuckerberg has released a tongue-in-cheek video about his new in-home AI system “Jarvis”, complete with a dig at Nickelback.
While the simple ‘smart home’ system (named after J.A.R.V.I.S. from Iron Man AKA “Just A Rather Very Intelligent System”) is for real, the video — featuring Jarvis voiced by ‘God’ himself, Morgan Freeman — is a funny take on the possibilities of controlling your daily home life via artificial intelligence.
“Hey, play us some good Nickelback songs,” Zuckerberg requests in the clip. “I’m sorry Mark, I can’t do that,” the sassy Jarvis quips in reply.
Jarvis is essentially Siri on steroids, and also assists with calendar reminders, unlocking the door for visitors, teaching Mandarin (in the most soothing voice we’ve heard – thanks, Morgan Freeman!) and dimming the lights for movie time.
In his related (serious) post, Zuckerberg outlines the systems connected to Jarvis, the coding involved, his reasons for creating the system in the first place (a “personal challenge”) and some of the bugs encountered along the way.
“I spent about 100 hours building Jarvis this year,” he says in his conclusion.
“And now I have a pretty good system that understands me and can do lots of things. But even if I spent 1,000 more hours, I probably wouldn’t be able to build a system that could learn completely new skills on its own — unless I made some fundamental breakthrough in the state of AI along the way.”
With next year’s challenge only a few days away (a flying suit of armour, perhaps?) Zuckerberg has proven why he’s one of the richest guys on the planet – creating artificial intelligence and having a dig at Nickelback all in a day’s work.
Watch the full video, below.
