On Sunday evening, Mark Zuckerberg announced his personal Challenge for 2016. In recent years, the Facebook CEO has taken on many endeavours like reading two books a month, meeting a new individual every day and even few days ago, announced that he would be donating 99% of his stake in Facebook. Now the philanthropist has adopted a different route. In a statement published on his Facebook account he states:
“…My personal challenge for 2016 is to build a simple AI to run my home and help me with my work. You can think of it kind of like Jarvis in Iron Man.
I’m going to start by exploring what technology is already out there. Then I’ll start teaching it to understand my voice to control everything in our home — music, lights, temperature and so on. I’ll teach it to let friends in by looking at their faces when they ring the doorbell. I’ll teach it to let me know if anything is going on in Max’s room that I need to check on when I’m not with her. On the work side, it’ll help me visualize data in VR to help me build better services and lead my organizations more effectively.“
Mark Zuckerberg also mentioned his affinity to indulge into the technical details of various other projects such as when he discusses ideas to bring free internet to the masses, development of Oculus VR glasses or the AI for Facebook Messenger with his team. But his new project would primarily be a solo effort as he writes:
“….it’s a different kind of rewarding to build things yourself, so this year my personal challenge is to do that.”
While it easy to laud Mark for his ambitions but one can’t help but ask Why? After all, he his a successful business man who is more than occupied with his ever growing company. So why stress yourself with another task? Maybe it has something to do with personal growth. If we take a look at his successful predecessors the likes of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Richard Branson and Eon Musk, they have all never halted the process of personal development. These individuals have always challenged themselves and even to this day they are continuing to set new personal benchmarks in both business & philanthropy. On that note wish Mar Zuckerberg all the best for his goals for the New Year!