
Mark Zuckerberg's 2016 personal challenge - frostmatthew
https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10102577175875681
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roymurdock
> 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.

> This should be a fun intellectual challenge to code this for myself. I'm
> looking forward to sharing what I learn over the course of the year.

I would be seriously impressed if he still had the technical chops to build
and code this kind of ambitious project on his own.

It's also interesting that he's opening his life up like this and promising to
share his (somewhat) individual work with the world, which most CEOs would
never do. It has the potential to open him up to critical scrutiny and/or
change his public persona. You would never see Musk releasing any updates on
personal (less-ambitious) projects because it would detract from his hard-
earned and paid-for superhero/wunderkind persona.

Seems like Zuck wants to be perceived more as a fun, quirky, techie rather
than the corporate CEO of Facebook. On the plus side, he'll probably get to
spend a lot more time with his daughter if he's hacking around the house all
day :)

~~~
chubot
Really? I wouldn't be very surprised at all. I'm sure the guy has serious
programming chops, and the goal is sufficiently vague. He's not literally
going to build Jarvis in a year, but there are lots of concrete things you can
build to automate your home that are Jarvis-like.

He says "simple", so I would say being able to understand and execute "turn
off the lights in the second floor bathroom" probably counts. I'm sure he can
do something like that in a year (even though there are programmers who
can't).

I think a lot of programmers are under the impression that he is this idiot
who knows a little PHP and got lucky building a website. But I'm sure he is
probably better than the vast majority of working programmers out there, on
account of building the initial versions of Facebook (and I say this as a
working programmer). People just don't want to believe that because he seems
douchey in many ways.

~~~
presty
Not to mention that he had built several other things prior to starting
Facebook.

There's also a lot of libs/services he can use

And if he needs help in understanding or implementing something, he can always
ask for some help from someone @ FB...

~~~
ericjang
This. I think most of the work that goes into building a successful large-
scale project is making the design choices that minimize required effort.

Everything after that is a matter of typing correctly and adjusting design
choices to unexpected constraints.

Having the knowledge of FB's engineering at his disposal will certainly make
things easier.

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matthewdavis
Guess this is what billionaires do with their free time. Bill Gates did this
to his house many moons ago.

~~~
firasd
That is exactly what I thought about.

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karmacondon
I love how this post perfectly encapsulates the concept of facebook: Someone
with a very comfortable life humble bragging about how he's going to use
technology to solve first world problems.

It is a cool idea and an interesting project, and publically declaring it will
probably help to motivate some people to take on projects of their own. But I
do get the feeling that he could be aiming a little higher. With great power
comes great responsibility and all that. The alluded to Iron Man was a
billionaire who used technology to fight gods and monsters. Zuckerberg
is...tinkering with the internet of things? Can't tell someone else how to
live their life, but I would have expected him to make public announcements
about the Big Problems and leave projects like this for cocktail party
conversation.

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olq
I've had a sci-fi-villain-hunch about this guy for a long time and this just
takes the cake. This is straight out of Ex-Machina, except for the hot robots
but who knows, maybe next year...

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codyb
There's a lot of neat libraries out there and papers to read. There's a lot of
hero worship, and a lot of disparaging comments as well between here and the
facebook post but a year is a serious amount of time, and with a little
dedication I'm sure he can expect to see some decent results out of his pet
project.

Similar to that hacker who built a "self driving car" in his garage, which, in
the end, although not being a polished finished project did self drive a
decent bit, I'm sure we can expect similar if not better results from
Zuckerberg here.

Anyone who's claiming differently may not have fooled around with some of the
libraries out there (I built something for named entity recognition with
Stanford's library in a few days once I found it), and might also be
overlooking the fact that we're talking about a person with a serious resume
of impressive accomplishments. I'm not sure how his Chinese is and to be fair
I was a little less than impressed with the two books a month goal (I do that
on the train it seems like anyways, but I don't have a huge company to be CEO
of or a family to spend time with), but we are certainly talking about someone
who qualified for entry into Harvard (based on merit I presume), and has the
drive to sit down and create websites (one of which eventually ballooned into
facebook, which he then steered through a public ipo). And let's be fair,
getting started is generally the hardest part.

I'd have to be hardpressed to discredit the guy, think ill of his challenge,
or feel he couldn't accomplish much regardless of my personal feelings about
his attitude and to that I say "Good on you Zuck! Here's to hoping I hear more
about this interesting project you've got going."

In the end, lord knows I always enjoy reading about cool projects.

~~~
bebna
> There's a lot of neat libraries out there and papers to read.

Can you please link those? Because I will move into a house in the middle of
the year and I do already have a concept for life form detection based on
sonar and 16X4 pixel IR thermal array (MLX90620 / MLX90621).

~~~
codyb
Hey, so I've mostly done stuff with natural language processing and Stanford's
NLP library which I don't think would help you here. But Google's TensorFlow
could maybe help you? I'd also look at some of the Python libraries. Just
search around and I'm sure you'll find what you need.

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JabavuAdams
Hmm. That's what I'm doing. Ok, so the pressure's on...

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mildbow
Why all the nay-sayers?

He's got a lofty goal. Better yet, it's lofty goal where you can get 70-80% of
the way quickly, and if passion serves, you can slog through the next 5-10%
throughout the year.

But, why all the negativity?

I, for one, am jealous of the resources (time + money) he has at his disposal
to make an actual go at this. But, that jealousy doesn't extend to me hoping
he fails.

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mei0Iesh
I feel like I've been seeing more celebrity type stuff on here lately. I guess
I would've been more impressed if the comments were about an actual project
instead of a personality. If this project is interesting enough to be on the
front page, why not talk about that?

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Havoc
I somehow doubt thats the most efficient use of his time but thats his right I
guess.

Anyone can have a go at this. Why not pick something that is both challenging
and out of reach of "lesser" mortals. Kinda like Bill Gates & his crusade to
eradicate Malaria.

~~~
edgyswingset
I wouldn't be shocked if he goes that route, but he's still the CEO of an
engineering-driven company. I think it would inspire confidence that the
person at the top cares about technical stuff and can empathize with other
employees who write code for a living.

Also I imagine he probably misses just hacking on stuff for fun.

~~~
joeyspn
> Also I imagine he probably misses just hacking on stuff for fun.

Exactly... Is that difficult to imagine that he just enjoys the process of
learning/building as many of us do? I've also been looking to start a new pet
project with simple AI just for the sake of grasping a better understanding of
NNs...

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amelius
Well, I guess if he succeeds in doing all of this in a year, it tells us that
AI is actually a much simpler discipline than, say, OS development, or
compiler design.

~~~
nanddalal
It could also suggest there are more tutorials and/or easy to use tools
available, making it easier for novices to make a quick impact in the field.

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nanddalal
I wonder if he means he is going to lead efforts to build an AI such as Jarvis
with some help from his friends at FAIR or whether he's actually going to sit
down and train his own models (for recognizing his family's faces for
example). Quite motivating actually to see someone who is leading a billion
dollar company to find the time to study machine learning on the side and
apply it.

~~~
x5n1
I seriously doubt Zuck is that smart or capable. Intelligence wise Zuck is no
Bill Gates. Go look at what Facebook looked like when it was just Zuck working
on it. Zuck has not been honing his skills at networking or AI or deep
learning for 10 years, he's been leading a company. He's not going to write
any of this. Zuck wants to come off like he's the brains behind all of it...
and sure he has business sense and billions of dollars to put that business
sense to the world. Technically he's very limited.

tl;dr Zuck is not Iron Man.

~~~
mjfl
That's pretty harsh considering you don't really know him at all, and he was
at least smart enough to build a company that was good enough to "get lucky"
and balloon to the billion dollar one it is now.

~~~
x5n1
It's hardly judging. Considering the amount of effort it takes to master a
single language or even a set of algos or putting those algos into a running
program. Unless you have been a programmer the last 10 years, you're a
manager. A manager should not try to take credit for what his programmers do.
That's really the really stupid thing about Stark, he did it all himself. No
one does it all him self. Everyone stands on the shoulder of giants.

~~~
mjfl
But I think saying "Mark Zuckerberg had help building facebook" is different
from saying "Mark Zuckerberg can't possibly implement the new AI algos on his
own", and the latter seems to imply he's some sort of an idiot, which he's
not.

~~~
pedrosorio
Doesn't sound like he is planning to implement new AI algorithms on his own:

"Thanks buddy! I'm still deciding between using the FB environment and AWS.
The FB environment gets me access to all of the great stuff the Facebook AI
research team has worked on, so I'll probably do that."
([https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10102577175875681?commen...](https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10102577175875681?comment_id=1193499537344277&reply_comment_id=1193505944010303&comment_tracking=%7B%22tn%22%3A%22R9%22%7D))

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bradley_long
Keep inventing and love innovation. That's the reason why he can be
successful. Some say you need to become a billionaire so that you can have
free time to invent. However, he could become a billionaire because he used
all his time on inventing. This is the fundamental difference between ordinary
people and billionaires.

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nadagast
Sounds like a fun challenge, but some of the comments here are a bit too hero-
worship-y for me... He's a mere person.

~~~
sean-duffy
There always seems to be that kind of vibe on any of his posts, they seem to
be mostly from people in Asian countries. I guess everyone needs a role model,
and when people see the chance to interact with theirs they really reach out
for it.

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krat0sprakhar
I think what's cool is that Zuck has actually replied to a good chunk of top-
level comments on his post. Most bigwigs on social-media don't really engage
with their "fans".

~~~
NamTaf
To be fair, replying on the platform he owns is a fairly significant value-add
process.

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theshadow
A lot of what he mentioned can be done without writing a line of code. He is
basically talking about a large scale home automation system with a voice
interface to it

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rdiddly
127.0.0.1 facebook.com

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sandworm101
> 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 wouldn't throw those names around too much. The Marvel movie empire might
not be worth as much as facebook, but it may be close. Those trademarked names
are valuable assets. There are firms out there ready to pounce on any
unauthorized use. Not the acceptable wording "like Jarvis in Iron Man." That's
ok as it uses the terms descriptively. His legal department would have
rejected "I'm building Jarvis".

[https://trademarks.justia.com/862/94/jarvis-86294162.html](https://trademarks.justia.com/862/94/jarvis-86294162.html)

"Computer application software that may be downloaded via global computer
networks and electronic communication networks for use in connection with
mobile computers, mobile phones, and tablet computers, namely, software for
use as a voice controlled personal digital assistant." .. not fictional
software. The Jarvis mark is protected in the real world just like Siri.

In the international descript Jarvis is also a "fire-extinguishing apparatus."
A coincidence, but it made me laugh.

