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.
