Over the past year, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took on a new project: building a home artificial intelligence (AI) system. His AI assistant, Jarvis, who makes toast for his wife Priscilla and plays music for his daughter Max, is voiced by none other than actor and beekeeper Morgan Freeman. Zuckerberg's goal for 2016 was to create an AI system "to run my home and help me with my work." His project seems to have been quite a success: Jarvis responds to the Zuckerberg family's voice commands to perform actions like switching off lights, informing them of the day's schedule, and even entertaining baby Max with Mandarin lessons while her parents wake up. Zuckerberg captured the potential of AI in a Facebook note on the project: "AI is closer to being able to do more powerful things than most people expect – driving cars, curing diseases, discovering planets…" Zuckerberg asked the Internet who should voice his home AI, in a Facebook post, of course.

By all accounts, 2016 has been an extraordinary year for Silicon Valley. Not only have the technology behemoths mustered a growing influence on Capitol Hill, their sheer market capitalization also testifies to one undeniable fact: They are the ones who change the world. The tech industry's missions are unapologetic and filled with passion. Their corporate myths are often wrapped up in their early days as startups. That some awkward twenty-year-old could turn their social ineptness into their biggest advantage and build a global enterprise from their garage is the highest expression of the American dream.

The main difference between data analysis today, compared with a decade or two ago, is the way that we interact with it. Previously, the role of statistics was primarily to extend our mental models by discovering new correlations and causal rules. Today, we increasingly delegate parts of our reasoning processes to algorithmic models that live outside our mental models. In my next few posts, I plan to explore some of the issues that arise from this delegation and how ideas such as model interpretability can potentially address them. Throughout this series of posts, I will argue that while current research has barely scratched the surface of understanding the interaction between algorithmic and mental models, these issues will be much more important to the future of data analysis than the technical performance of the models themselves.

Virtually everywhere you look, Bay Area tech businesses are running into walls. Smartphones were revolutionary and lucrative, but the U.S. market is saturated, and Apple's iPhone sales have fallen for three quarters. The "app economy" has matured, with more people using existing apps than downloading new ones. And Facebook, which has filled users' news feeds with so many ads it can barely add more, is predicting its revenue growth will slump next year. Silicon Valley needs its next big thing, a focus for the concentrated brain power and innovation infrastructure that have made this region the world leader in transformative technology.

With the adoption of Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa, the Internet of Things (IoT) is already part of our home lives. Many of us also use a smart thermostat to monitor the temperature of our living rooms, and maybe even a smart doorbell to keep an eye on the front porch. What technologies do you think are likely to change the way people do business? I definitely believe embedding communications via WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication) will be the next big thing for businesses, especially since it directly affects our rate of communication and in turn our rate of efficiency. Anything that will make life easier will affect our productivity and is going to be here to stay.

This week, Mark Zuckerberg published the results of his 2016 project -- building a real world Jarvis. This AI-based personal assistant gets commands from Zuck, and in turn, operates certain parts of his home. Here's a video he posted (with a special voice actor) showing Jarvis' functionalities. One of the things I immediately noticed about this diagram is that Jarvis gains most of his power from connecting through APIs. As you probably know, an API is an applied programming interface that allows one piece of software to talk to another.

Mark Zuckerberg has enlisted the help of Morgan Freeman and taken a shot at Nickelback while unveiling his new artificial intelligence assistant. The Facebook founder and CEO showed off "Jarvis" with a post on the project and videos on his Facebook page. The voice interactive assistant takes its name from a similar AI device in the "Iron Man" films. Zuckerberg can be seen in the videos using Jarvis to control lights, the thermostat and even make toast. It also plays music, but when asked by Zuckerberg to play some good songs by the much derided Canadian band, Nickelback, Jarvis replies: "There are no good Nickelback songs."

Amazon's Echo has made tangible the promise of an artificially intelligent personal assistant in every home. Those who own the voice-activated gadget (known colloquially as Alexa, after its female interlocutor) are prone to proselytizing "her" charms, applauding Alexa's ability to call an Uber, order pizza or check a 10th-grader's math homework. The company says more than 5,000 people a day profess their love for Alexa. On the other hand, Alexa devotees also know that unless you speak to her very clearly . . . I hate her, I love her," one customer wrote on Amazon's website, while still awarding Alexa five stars.

I believe it was Sartre who wisely said hell is conversational AI. Despite the best intentions of engineers, today's machine learning really is the savior and handicap of personal assistants. Berkeley-based startup Semantic Machines might suffer the same Achilles' heel, but its team of 18 artificial intelligence PhDs thinks it can get farther than the current state-of-the-art establishment. To understand what Semantic Machines is trying to build, you have to think about what existing personal assistants lack. Behind relatable names and repetitive humor, Siri, Google Assistant, Cortana and Alexa all essentially work the same way -- they recognize and parse speech, classify intent and then execute commands.

He's been the voice of God, narrated the journey of penguins, and delivered driving instructions. Now, Morgan Freeman is lending his iconic sound to Mark Zuckerberg. The Facebook CEO on Tuesday introduced Jarvis, a digital butler that can do everything from controlling living room lights to entertaining baby daughter Max. Inspired by Tony "Iron Man" Stark's fictional Jarvis AI, Zuck's personal assistant can control lights, open the front gate for family and friends, make toast, and help choose daily outfits or entertain Zuckerberg's daughter, Max. Early this year, Zuckerberg announced plans to build a robot valet using technology like voice and facial recognition, data visualization, and automated nannying.