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3 Reasons Mark Zuckerberg’s Smart Home Isn’t That Smart

For one of his personal “challenges” posted on Facebook at the beginning of 2016, Mark Zuckerberg set out to build an artificial-intelligence assistant to run his home. So he spent his spare time last year coding Jarvis, named after the slightly annoying, British-accented AI that powers Tony Stark‘s high-tech mansion in the “Iron Man” movies.

Those are big shoes to fill, considering Jarvis has the ability to make Stark’s superhero suit fly. But still, if anyone can trump that it’s the founder of Facebook, right?

Well, not exactly.

Alas, when Zuckerberg recently unveiled his creation in an exclusive interview with Fast Company, it was clear his virtual assistant was still, um, a work in progress.

So what can Jarvis do? At the time of the Fast Company demonstration, it could turn lights on and off, play music, open the front gate through face recognition software (thanks to Facebook’s image and voice recognition abilities), turn on a kitchen appliance like a toaster, and wake up Zuckerberg’s 1-year-old daughter, Max, with Mandarin lessons (ugh). All the Facebook chief had to do was speak or type his command into his iPhone, and his wish would be Jarvis’ command.

Still, though, many of these tricks are things that other virtual assistants—think Amazon Echo and Google Home—can do already in their sleep (that is, if they slept, which they don’t).

In case you’re wondering, no, you can’t buy Jarvis (for now, this is still just Zuckerberg’s hobby), nor would you probably want to. Here’s how Zuckerberg’s smart home fell short, and the lessons learned along the way.

1. His voice commands didn’t work on the first try

Jarvis didn’t always obey voice commands right away. When demonstrating how the assistant can control lights, Zuckerberg had to ask Jarvis to turn off the lights four times. It also took two commands to turn up the music and two commands to turn it off.

He bashfully exclaimed, “Wow, that’s like the most fails that it’s ever had.” We can almost see him squirming. It’s not a pleasant sight.

2. Jarvis couldn’t understand context

One of the biggest challenges all programmers, including Zuckerberg, face is teaching AI context. What you command in one situation can have a very different meaning in the next.

“When I tell it to turn the AC up in ‘my office,’ that means something completely different from when [my wife] Priscilla tells it the exact same thing,” Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post he wrote chronicling his path to building Jarvis. “That one caused some issues!”

3. He had to revert to technology from the 1950s

Hacking household items is not uncommon in the world of smart homes when you want to program a certain skill. Zuckerberg wanted Jarvis to make toast, but modern toasters wouldn’t allow the bread to get pushed down while the toaster was off. So Zuckerberg had to buy an old toaster from the ’50s that would do what he wanted—one that lacked the safety restrictions of today’s toasters.

In other words, his breakfast cravings could burn down his house.

So what went wrong?

It’s not that Zuckerberg is a crappy coder, of course; he just lacked the manpower. The Facebook founder claims he spent about 100 hours of his spare time over the past year building Jarvis from scratch, on his own. If he’d had a team of engineers helping out, he most likely would’ve had more to show off. But hey, this was just a pet project, and he has a multibillion-dollar company to run.

But if Zuckerberg’s failings illustrate anything, it’s that the “smart home” we’ve been eagerly anticipating could still be a ways off from becoming a reality.

As he summarized on Facebook, “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.”

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