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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think it's worth pointing out that he started his mobile efforts by talking about how easy it was to make a Facebook Messenger bot, something they're heavily pushing... and then said shortly thereafter, to do what he wanted, he had to switch to making his own app, because Messenger couldn't do what he wanted.
If a Google exec wrote this post, it would be about how amazing a Google product was as a solution to the problem, and that would be the end of it. But here's Mark saying "you know what, Messenger is great but I needed more". And maybe that could turn into some pretty big advice for his Messenger team on what to add next, but he seemed to be pointing out where the industry (including his own company) could do better.
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.
> 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.
