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Say what you will about Zuckerberg, but this is a really cool project! Steps he took: 1. Connect his home devices (lights, thermostat, doors, music player, TV,

Say what you will about Zuckerberg, but this is a really cool project! Steps he took: 1. Connect his home devices (lights, thermostat, doors, music player, TV, CCTV etc) to his computer, so he can turn them on and off from it and in general automate his house from his PC. 2. Add an NLP component to his computer, so he could text instructions to it and it would apply the correct automation task. This can learn preferences too and be told about mistakes so it does better in the future. 3. Add face recognition, so it can recognise people at his door and automatically open it if they are expected. 4. Add speech recognition, by creating an app for the phone that is constantly on and listening for his voice. This is then converted to automation tasks again. All in all, an interesting way to spend 100 hours. Calling it AI is a bit of a stretch though; this is basically linking up a bunch of in-accurate sensory parsers, coupled with some limited machine learning, connected to a bunch of if statements. Still a long way off of Jarvis, who is basically a genius by human standards!

deleted 10y ago
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IanCal 10y ago
I think what's particularly great about this in a way is that it's not too remarkable. I'm not knocking it, but it's awesome to be around when creating an natural language, speech controlled, available anywhere system with face recognition to automate your own home is something that can be done in 100 hours.
- ChuckMcM 10y ago
  I agree with the sentiment, the hours of course are the assembly time. When people ask me the role of an architect I try to impress upon them that well architected subsystems will be readily composable into a variety of forms and uses. That amplifies the millions of hours of research and development into a tool that can be wielded by a motivated individual or team to tremendous advantage.
  - andrewstuart2 10y ago
    95% of the time, good software creation is really just construction, not engineering. There are great paradigms and solutions to the majority of problems. There's room for design and UX, but you shouldn't need to custom engineer the walls out of carbon fiber or some aerospace composites unless you're launching the house to Mars. The engineering aspect really only comes into play when no components meet your needs. The construction metaphor is full of great wisdom to be gleaned as software developers. And I'm not just saying that in hopes I didn't waste all those hours watching History Channel documentaries. :-D
    - taneq 10y ago
      When you're talking about civil/mechanical engineering, good engineering is 'just construction' too. Your job is to take well known, tried-and-tested techniques and combine them in a safe and reliable way to produce a design which meets all of your requirements and can be built for your target price. Engineering isn't really a place for more than very limited creativity. That place is R&D.
    - threeseed 10y ago
      Would strongly disagree with this. For me a well designed house is actually, you know, about the design. And whilst the construction is important due to standards it is largely irrelevant. The analogy to software is apt. Well designed, well architected software is so important. Anyone can write syntactically proper code. Far harder to design a system that has just the right amount of extensibility, performance, elegance etc to meet the requirements without going over the top.
      - jburwell 10y ago
        Ask owners of beautifully designed Frank Lloyd Wright houses how happy they are with the leaky roofs that plague them. Wright didn't understand construction which lead to many practical flaws when people tried to actually build his designs.
- ocdtrekkie 10y ago
  I think the remarkable bit is that he did this while being the CEO of Facebook. There's not a huge number of corporate CEOs who still code at all, and have time to put in a big project like this. And as someone who's worked with writing some of the same sort of code, it's really enjoyable to see someone drastically more talented making many of the same observations and encountering similar challenges.
  - skummetmaelk 10y ago
    It goes under CEO time as marketing.
    - mikeleeorg 10y ago
      I don't think he intended it to be marketing, but kudos to him for being able to spin it as a way to promote Facebook too. I see it more as R&D than marketing, personally. His personal experiments may likely hint at new directions in which he wants to take his company. Depending on how you view Facebook, this could be terrifying or exciting. One way I see it is: Facebook knows a lot about your (online) social interactions. Home-based AI would need to know a lot about your private behaviors and preferences. If they marry those two worlds, that's a heck of a lot of behavioral information to have. Google has a big lead in this area already, so if Facebook goes this direction too, it would be an interesting to see how it plays out.
    - tomcam 10y ago
      Facile, needlessly cynical, and with zero evidence. I don't like FB or Zuckerberg, but what I read was a good write up of a fun project done well.
      - floatrock 10y ago
        Oh come on, it was clearly both. Try to tell us this excerpt is not an advertisement for the facebook SDK: > I'd learn a lot about the state of AI this year, but I didn't realize I would also learn so much about what it's like to be an engineer at Facebook. And it's impressive. > My experience of ramping up in the Facebook codebase is probably pretty similar to what most new engineers here go through. I was consistently impressed by how well organized our code is, and how easy it was to find what you're looking for -- whether it's related to face recognition, speech recognition, the Messenger Bot Framework [messenger.com/platform] or iOS development... The rest of that paragraph goes through all the other developer tools you can sign up for in the facebook ecosystem, including convenient links. Then it continues: > One of our values is "move fast". That means you should be able to come here and build an app faster than you can anywhere else, including on your own. You should be able to come here and use our infra and AI tools to build things it would take you a long time to build on your own. It was a neat project, not denying that, but there is no free lunch. The CEO of a Fortune 500 does not write up a 5-10 min read without plugging his interests. You can enjoy what he's doing, but also recognize what it is.
- jimbokun 10y ago
  It's the new WIMP! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIMP_(computing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIMP_(computing)
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- amelius 10y ago
  > it's awesome to be around when creating an natural language, speech controlled, available anywhere system with face recognition to automate your own home is something that can be done in 100 hours It's not creating. It's just copy+pasting and glueing. The actual creation of these systems took decades of research.
dmcginty 10y ago
I don't think calling it AI is a stretch. It's a system with sensors, actuators, a knowledge base, and a ruleset; plus it can learn and adapt its ruleset based on success/failure. That's the textbook definition of AI.
- twothamendment 10y ago
  You added one thing in the list that makes me agree - "it can learn and adapt". Jarvis in my house uses sensors, actuators, lights, switches, etc - but mine is not AI. It only does what I tell it how to do. I'm pretty happy with the results, but it can't learn a thing. The latest thing I "taught" my Jarvis to do is stream the security camera to the TV with a voice command. Now if I only had time to look into how to tell it to stop...
  - dmcginty 10y ago
    That being said, I don't think the ability to learn and adapt. This is entirely a statement on semantics, but if I made a tic-tac-toe playing program that had every possible game state pre-programmed in, I would not hesitate to call it a game playing AI even though it lacks the ability to learn.
    - kyrias 10y ago
      That would just follow a singular simple algorithm, not really intelligence in any sense.
      - bmh100 10y ago
        In the general programming industry over the last several decades, "artificial intelligence" has also applied to simple decision-making algorithms, even as simple as playing checkers. Arthur Samuel [1] was renowned for his work on a checkers AI circa 1959. [1]: http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~sutton/book/11/node3.html http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~sutton/book/11/node3.html
        10y ago
corobo 10y ago
> Add face recognition, so it can recognise people at his door and automatically open it if they are expected I wonder if you could open his door with an A4 printout of his face. That's the sort of thing I'd worry about creating this system. Edit: Forgive me HN, it looks like a lot of people have wondered this. I only commented so high up because I commented before reading all the comments! Go upvote the more creative/indepth versions of this question rather than this one :)
- kefka 10y ago
  There's a decent way to handle this method: use one of the Intel close RGBD cameras. I think they go by RealSense. Now, do facial recognition with the depth component. "Oh look, paper. How quaint... NOPE!" You could also log all people coming by with a known-unknown axis. You could train the system so that all they need do is look at the door, and they have the appropriate access they need. And it could also, instead, default in a "pass through to app for user to decide". Don't think of this as a huge monolithic system... But instead of dozens of component parts that can work together. Then, the problem is certainly tractable. And then adding things like Google-Now, Alexa, Siri, and similar is no longer damn near impossible. I particularly like Node-Red for this very project. It is javasript, however the big positive side effect is easy implementation with all sorts of nodejs APIs.
  - corobo 10y ago
    Ooh you could do all that and instead of a flat out denial based system fall back to a fingerprint scanning doorbell. Probably a weird conversation to have in the pub "Alright lads I'm gonna need you all to scan your fingerprints for me"
    - kefka 10y ago
      Not at all. I already wrote a system that can take new facial inputs, classify you as "new user", and put your data in a database. All you need do is go up to the door. I can easily view the timecode and enter your details (name, phone#, email) at a later date. source: https://github.com/jwcrawley/uWho https://github.com/jwcrawley/uWho news article about it: http://hackaday.com/2015/03/04/face-recognition-for-your-next-con/ http://hackaday.com/2015/03/04/face-recognition-for-your-nex...
jimbokun 10y ago
"Calling it AI is a bit of a stretch though" The building blocks, though, very much fit classic definitions of AI: face recognition, speech recognition, natural language parsing. But no, its not Jarvis. Yet.
GavinB 10y ago
this is basically linking up a bunch of in-accurate sensory parsers, coupled with some limited machine learning, connected to a bunch of if statements Add enough complicated if statements and you've got a rough definition of a human!
paulddraper 10y ago
> Calling it AI is a bit of a stretch though; this is basically linking up a bunch of in-accurate sensory parsers, coupled with some limited machine learning, connected to a bunch of if statements. The bar for "AI" (as distinct from "Jarvis-level AI") isn't high. Heck, video games have had "AIs" since the 1950s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence_(video_games) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence_(video... Not sure if everyone agrees with that definition, but's it the one in common use.
nashashmi 10y ago
> "Calling it AI is a bit of a stretch though" If so, then Machine Learning is just predicting the next possible result using the statistical probability of previously studied data, and could not qualify as AI either. AI is being broken down in to so many parts, some that are invisible to us, that: either we abuse it to the point of over simplification, reclassify it as common sense, and redraw the finish line of where AI starts; OR we start calling everything we do a version of AI from computers turning off the lights to balancing the controls in the first Apollo missions.
haser_au 10y ago
>> Calling it AI is a bit of a stretch though Mark replied to a comment along these exact lines. Quote below; Mark Zuckerberg: That's the thing about AI. It's sort of like magic. We only call things AI that we don't understand yet. Once we understand something, it's just math. But if you'd asked someone 30 years if a computer system that you could talk to, that could see your friends and let them in, that could learn your listening habits and figure out when to make you toast, if that was intelligent, then most people would have said that would be AI. Now that we know how to do it, it's just math.
- hacker_9 10y ago
  And yet 30 years we could do all that with a whole lot of if statements. It would just return false positives a lot more. A couple of others have replied saying the same thing as you that this is 'AI', but it's not. As soon as you try to use it for something it wasn't programmed for, it fails. It doesn't even understand what it is doing right now. This isn't me 'moving the goalposts' either, we have literally never achieved anything close to AI. It baffles me that people think this is even remotely AI to be honest.
  - haser_au 10y ago
    Have a read of this; http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolu... It's a very long read, but it will give you a much better overview of AI and the different "calibres" than I could possibly try to in a HN comment. What Mark has used here is "Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI)", the first of three levels/calibres of AI. Level 2 is "Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)", otherwise known as "Human Level AI". And level 3 is "Artificial Superintelligence (ASI)" which is "“an intellect that is much smarter than the best human brains in practically every field, including scientific creativity, general wisdom and social skills.” [Quote: Nick Bostrom].
    - hacker_9 10y ago
      sigh this is why I don't usually get involved in arguments about whether something is considered AI or not; it just devolves into people trying to define and redefine what the word 'AI' even means. Final word: I follow this stuff closely and read the research articles, and what we currently have is really great, but it's still just pulling the wool over your eyes. These techniques and algorithms trick you into thinking they are intelligent when in fact they are anything but. What we have now is a parlour trick in comparison to what the brain is doing. When true AI actually comes along, no one will doubt it.
puranjay 10y ago
I was pleasantly surprised that it was actually written by Zuck. Good on him that he is still doing something he enjoys - coding. (And world domination. The next step for the AI, obviously)
OJFord 10y ago
> an interesting way to spend 100 hours If you're in a position to. It sounds like he plugged into Facebook's face recognition, for example, and I don't think that's available as an API request ('is this one of my friends')?

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

IanCal 10y ago

I think what's particularly great about this in a way is that it's not too remarkable. I'm not knocking it, but it's awesome to be around when creating an natural language, speech controlled, available anywhere system with face recognition to automate your own home is something that can be done in 100 hours.

ChuckMcM 10y ago
I agree with the sentiment, the hours of course are the assembly time. When people ask me the role of an architect I try to impress upon them that well architected subsystems will be readily composable into a variety of forms and uses. That amplifies the millions of hours of research and development into a tool that can be wielded by a motivated individual or team to tremendous advantage.
- andrewstuart2 10y ago
  95% of the time, good software creation is really just construction, not engineering. There are great paradigms and solutions to the majority of problems. There's room for design and UX, but you shouldn't need to custom engineer the walls out of carbon fiber or some aerospace composites unless you're launching the house to Mars. The engineering aspect really only comes into play when no components meet your needs. The construction metaphor is full of great wisdom to be gleaned as software developers. And I'm not just saying that in hopes I didn't waste all those hours watching History Channel documentaries. :-D
  - taneq 10y ago
    When you're talking about civil/mechanical engineering, good engineering is 'just construction' too. Your job is to take well known, tried-and-tested techniques and combine them in a safe and reliable way to produce a design which meets all of your requirements and can be built for your target price. Engineering isn't really a place for more than very limited creativity. That place is R&D.
  - threeseed 10y ago
    Would strongly disagree with this. For me a well designed house is actually, you know, about the design. And whilst the construction is important due to standards it is largely irrelevant. The analogy to software is apt. Well designed, well architected software is so important. Anyone can write syntactically proper code. Far harder to design a system that has just the right amount of extensibility, performance, elegance etc to meet the requirements without going over the top.
    - jburwell 10y ago
      Ask owners of beautifully designed Frank Lloyd Wright houses how happy they are with the leaky roofs that plague them. Wright didn't understand construction which lead to many practical flaws when people tried to actually build his designs.
ocdtrekkie 10y ago
I think the remarkable bit is that he did this while being the CEO of Facebook. There's not a huge number of corporate CEOs who still code at all, and have time to put in a big project like this. And as someone who's worked with writing some of the same sort of code, it's really enjoyable to see someone drastically more talented making many of the same observations and encountering similar challenges.
- skummetmaelk 10y ago
  It goes under CEO time as marketing.
  - mikeleeorg 10y ago
    I don't think he intended it to be marketing, but kudos to him for being able to spin it as a way to promote Facebook too. I see it more as R&D than marketing, personally. His personal experiments may likely hint at new directions in which he wants to take his company. Depending on how you view Facebook, this could be terrifying or exciting. One way I see it is: Facebook knows a lot about your (online) social interactions. Home-based AI would need to know a lot about your private behaviors and preferences. If they marry those two worlds, that's a heck of a lot of behavioral information to have. Google has a big lead in this area already, so if Facebook goes this direction too, it would be an interesting to see how it plays out.
  - tomcam 10y ago
    Facile, needlessly cynical, and with zero evidence. I don't like FB or Zuckerberg, but what I read was a good write up of a fun project done well.
    - floatrock 10y ago
      Oh come on, it was clearly both. Try to tell us this excerpt is not an advertisement for the facebook SDK: > I'd learn a lot about the state of AI this year, but I didn't realize I would also learn so much about what it's like to be an engineer at Facebook. And it's impressive. > My experience of ramping up in the Facebook codebase is probably pretty similar to what most new engineers here go through. I was consistently impressed by how well organized our code is, and how easy it was to find what you're looking for -- whether it's related to face recognition, speech recognition, the Messenger Bot Framework [messenger.com/platform] or iOS development... The rest of that paragraph goes through all the other developer tools you can sign up for in the facebook ecosystem, including convenient links. Then it continues: > One of our values is "move fast". That means you should be able to come here and build an app faster than you can anywhere else, including on your own. You should be able to come here and use our infra and AI tools to build things it would take you a long time to build on your own. It was a neat project, not denying that, but there is no free lunch. The CEO of a Fortune 500 does not write up a 5-10 min read without plugging his interests. You can enjoy what he's doing, but also recognize what it is.
jimbokun 10y ago
It's the new WIMP! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIMP_(computing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIMP_(computing)
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
amelius 10y ago
> it's awesome to be around when creating an natural language, speech controlled, available anywhere system with face recognition to automate your own home is something that can be done in 100 hours It's not creating. It's just copy+pasting and glueing. The actual creation of these systems took decades of research.

dmcginty 10y ago

I don't think calling it AI is a stretch. It's a system with sensors, actuators, a knowledge base, and a ruleset; plus it can learn and adapt its ruleset based on success/failure. That's the textbook definition of AI.

twothamendment 10y ago
You added one thing in the list that makes me agree - "it can learn and adapt". Jarvis in my house uses sensors, actuators, lights, switches, etc - but mine is not AI. It only does what I tell it how to do. I'm pretty happy with the results, but it can't learn a thing. The latest thing I "taught" my Jarvis to do is stream the security camera to the TV with a voice command. Now if I only had time to look into how to tell it to stop...
- dmcginty 10y ago
  That being said, I don't think the ability to learn and adapt. This is entirely a statement on semantics, but if I made a tic-tac-toe playing program that had every possible game state pre-programmed in, I would not hesitate to call it a game playing AI even though it lacks the ability to learn.
  - kyrias 10y ago
    That would just follow a singular simple algorithm, not really intelligence in any sense.
    - bmh100 10y ago
      In the general programming industry over the last several decades, "artificial intelligence" has also applied to simple decision-making algorithms, even as simple as playing checkers. Arthur Samuel [1] was renowned for his work on a checkers AI circa 1959. [1]: http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~sutton/book/11/node3.html http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~sutton/book/11/node3.html
      - 10y ago

corobo 10y ago

> Add face recognition, so it can recognise people at his door and automatically open it if they are expected I wonder if you could open his door with an A4 printout of his face. That's the sort of thing I'd worry about creating this system. Edit: Forgive me HN, it looks like a lot of people have wondered this. I only commented so high up because I commented before reading all the comments! Go upvote the more creative/indepth versions of this question rather than this one :)

kefka 10y ago
There's a decent way to handle this method: use one of the Intel close RGBD cameras. I think they go by RealSense. Now, do facial recognition with the depth component. "Oh look, paper. How quaint... NOPE!" You could also log all people coming by with a known-unknown axis. You could train the system so that all they need do is look at the door, and they have the appropriate access they need. And it could also, instead, default in a "pass through to app for user to decide". Don't think of this as a huge monolithic system... But instead of dozens of component parts that can work together. Then, the problem is certainly tractable. And then adding things like Google-Now, Alexa, Siri, and similar is no longer damn near impossible. I particularly like Node-Red for this very project. It is javasript, however the big positive side effect is easy implementation with all sorts of nodejs APIs.
- corobo 10y ago
  Ooh you could do all that and instead of a flat out denial based system fall back to a fingerprint scanning doorbell. Probably a weird conversation to have in the pub "Alright lads I'm gonna need you all to scan your fingerprints for me"
  - kefka 10y ago
    Not at all. I already wrote a system that can take new facial inputs, classify you as "new user", and put your data in a database. All you need do is go up to the door. I can easily view the timecode and enter your details (name, phone#, email) at a later date. source: https://github.com/jwcrawley/uWho https://github.com/jwcrawley/uWho news article about it: http://hackaday.com/2015/03/04/face-recognition-for-your-next-con/ http://hackaday.com/2015/03/04/face-recognition-for-your-nex...

jimbokun 10y ago

"Calling it AI is a bit of a stretch though" The building blocks, though, very much fit classic definitions of AI: face recognition, speech recognition, natural language parsing. But no, its not Jarvis. Yet.

GavinB 10y ago

this is basically linking up a bunch of in-accurate sensory parsers, coupled with some limited machine learning, connected to a bunch of if statements Add enough complicated if statements and you've got a rough definition of a human!

paulddraper 10y ago

> Calling it AI is a bit of a stretch though; this is basically linking up a bunch of in-accurate sensory parsers, coupled with some limited machine learning, connected to a bunch of if statements. The bar for "AI" (as distinct from "Jarvis-level AI") isn't high. Heck, video games have had "AIs" since the 1950s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence_(video_games) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence_(video... Not sure if everyone agrees with that definition, but's it the one in common use.

nashashmi 10y ago

> "Calling it AI is a bit of a stretch though" If so, then Machine Learning is just predicting the next possible result using the statistical probability of previously studied data, and could not qualify as AI either. AI is being broken down in to so many parts, some that are invisible to us, that: either we abuse it to the point of over simplification, reclassify it as common sense, and redraw the finish line of where AI starts; OR we start calling everything we do a version of AI from computers turning off the lights to balancing the controls in the first Apollo missions.

haser_au 10y ago

>> Calling it AI is a bit of a stretch though Mark replied to a comment along these exact lines. Quote below; Mark Zuckerberg: That's the thing about AI. It's sort of like magic. We only call things AI that we don't understand yet. Once we understand something, it's just math. But if you'd asked someone 30 years if a computer system that you could talk to, that could see your friends and let them in, that could learn your listening habits and figure out when to make you toast, if that was intelligent, then most people would have said that would be AI. Now that we know how to do it, it's just math.

hacker_9 10y ago
And yet 30 years we could do all that with a whole lot of if statements. It would just return false positives a lot more. A couple of others have replied saying the same thing as you that this is 'AI', but it's not. As soon as you try to use it for something it wasn't programmed for, it fails. It doesn't even understand what it is doing right now. This isn't me 'moving the goalposts' either, we have literally never achieved anything close to AI. It baffles me that people think this is even remotely AI to be honest.
- haser_au 10y ago
  Have a read of this; http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolu... It's a very long read, but it will give you a much better overview of AI and the different "calibres" than I could possibly try to in a HN comment. What Mark has used here is "Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI)", the first of three levels/calibres of AI. Level 2 is "Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)", otherwise known as "Human Level AI". And level 3 is "Artificial Superintelligence (ASI)" which is "“an intellect that is much smarter than the best human brains in practically every field, including scientific creativity, general wisdom and social skills.” [Quote: Nick Bostrom].
  - hacker_9 10y ago
    sigh this is why I don't usually get involved in arguments about whether something is considered AI or not; it just devolves into people trying to define and redefine what the word 'AI' even means. Final word: I follow this stuff closely and read the research articles, and what we currently have is really great, but it's still just pulling the wool over your eyes. These techniques and algorithms trick you into thinking they are intelligent when in fact they are anything but. What we have now is a parlour trick in comparison to what the brain is doing. When true AI actually comes along, no one will doubt it.

puranjay 10y ago

I was pleasantly surprised that it was actually written by Zuck. Good on him that he is still doing something he enjoys - coding. (And world domination. The next step for the AI, obviously)

OJFord 10y ago

> an interesting way to spend 100 hours If you're in a position to. It sounds like he plugged into Facebook's face recognition, for example, and I don't think that's available as an API request ('is this one of my friends')?