Frederic Legrand - COMEO / Shutterstock.com</sp
Frederic Legrand – COMEO / Shutterstock.com

What do you do with your free time after you’ve developed one of the largest social media networks in the world and have accumulated enough wealth to allow you to retire in your early 30s? You take on passion projects that may not necessarily be game changing, but allow you to continue to hone your skills, and stay up to date. At least, that seems to be the mantra of Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg, who no longer codes the giant social network himself, but has passed on the reigns to his empire of coders and engineers, but still wants to stay current with the tools that his team uses on a daily basis.

So what did he choose as his most recent passion project? Zuckerberg wanted his own version of JARVIS, the AI Tony Stark uses in the MCU to run his life/ empire, so Zuckerberg went about designing his own version of the famous AI from scratch, even though we do already have some AI out there that are somewhat similar like Cortana, Siri, or Alexa. And once the project neared completion, Zuckerberg began looking for a voice for his personal AI. While Robert Downey Jr. himself was interested in the project (though he had some stipulations such as a convoluted pricing system which would have all the money paid to Paul Bettany (who plays Jarvis in the film) who would then donate all the money to a charity of Benedict Cumberbatch’s (who played ‘Doctor Strange’ in the films) choosing), Zuckerberg ended up going in another direction, which no one can fault him for. He went with the soothing tones of Morgan Freeman as the voice of his AI, which is a phenomenal choice, as who would not want Morgan Freeman’s voice speaking to them on a daily basis, updating them on their stocks, how the house is doing, telling them their schedule for the day, etc.

As of now, it seems Zuckerberg’s AI is just for his own personal use, but no one would be surprised if eventually it became the basis for a Cortana type AI that Facebook eventually rolls out to rival the competition. Hopefully they can keep Freeman’s voice, as that alone would win me over. Until then, we will all just have one more thing to be jealous of Zuckerberg about.

Source:  Fast Company

horizontal lineNick is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles, who belongs to the privileged few who enjoyed the ending to ‘Lost.’ For more of Nick’s thoughts and articles, follow him on Twitter.