Mark Zuckerberg: I've Built AI Butler Named Jarvis

Mark Zuckerberg says he's built an artificially intelligent, voice-controlled butler for his home – and named it Jarvis, after superhero Iron Man Tony Stark's home computer. The Facebook honcho's AI personal assistant can turn the house lights on and off, play songs, recognize who's at the front door and let people in, manage the temperature, activate a toaster – and has even been programmed with a sense of humor. "I've taught it fun little games like [wife] Priscilla or I can ask it who we should tickle and it will randomly tell our family to all go tickle one of us, [daughter] Max or [pet dog] Beast," Zuckerberg writes in a Facebook post Monday. "I've also had fun adding classic lines like'I'm sorry, Priscilla. Zuckerberg said the project was one of his 2016 challenges. "In some ways, this challenge was easier than I expected," he wrote, comparing it to his other goal of running 365 miles in 2016. He says building Jarvis, which "uses several artificial intelligence techniques, including natural language processing, speech recognition, face recognition, and reinforcement learning, written in Python, PHP and Objective C," took less time than the running. But he said one of the biggest takeaways from the project was figuring out the promise and limits of AI. "In a way, AI is both closer and farther off than we imagine," he wrote. "AI is closer to being able to do more powerful things than most people expect – driving cars, curing diseases, discovering planets, understanding media.