Mark Zuckerberg is challenging himself to build an artificially intelligent butler

(Image credit: MONEY SHARMA/AFP/Getty Images)

last updated 4 January 2016

Mark Zuckerberg's New Year's resolution isn't to hit the gym once a day or eat more vegetables — the Facebook CEO wants to build artificial intelligence to help him around his house and at work.

"You can think of it kind of like Jarvis in Iron Man," he wrote in a message on Facebook. Zuckerberg said every year he takes on a "personal challenge to learn new things and grow outside my work at Facebook," and this challenge is very different from previous ones (including learning Mandarin and reading two books every month). Zuckerberg said he'll begin by "exploring what technology is already out there," and will then start teaching the AI to "understand my voice to control everything in our home."

He will instruct it to recognize his friends by "looking at their faces when they ring the doorbell" and to let him know if anything is happening in his newborn daughter Max's room when he's not with her. As for work, "it'll help me visualize data in VR and help me build better services and lead my organizations more effectively," he wrote. Zuckerberg said it's a fulfilling experience to work with engineers to build new things, but "it's a different kind of rewarding to build things yourself, so this year my personal challenge is to do that."

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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

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