Earlier this week, Mark Zuckerberg shared his thoughts on his most recent personal project, Jarvis, which is an AI program he created himself. The note is a great read for anyone interested in artificial intelligence, or even those who have ever just been curious how Siri, Alexa, or their Google Assistant works.
In the coming year, it seems there will be a lot of focus on making machines more intelligent. Where the head of a technology company chooses to spend their time is often a good indication of where the resources under them will flow. At Crushh, we're focused on the same thing, but with the specific goal of helping people understand each other. There's a good amount of work to be done, and the challenges are well captured in Zuckerberg's own words below. We're excited for the work ahead!
“I’ve previously predicted that within 5-10 years we’ll have AI systems that are more accurate than people for each of our senses — vision, hearing, touch, etc, as well as things like language. It’s impressive how powerful the state of the art for these tools is becoming, and this year makes me more confident in my prediction.
At the same time, we are still far off from understanding how learning works. Everything I did this year — natural language, face recognition, speech recognition and so on — are all variants of the same fundamental pattern recognition techniques. We know how to show a computer many examples of something so it can recognize it accurately, but we still do not know how to take an idea from one domain and apply it to something completely different.
To put that in perspective, I spent about 100 hours building Jarvis this year, 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.
In a way, AI is both closer and farther off than we imagine. AI is closer to being able to do more powerful things than most people expect — driving cars, curing diseases, discovering planets, understanding media. Those will each have a great impact on the world, but we’re still figuring out what real intelligence is.”
