Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook had a long Q&A time with his Facebook followers today (June 30 2015) to understand what the community is thinking about. This has received good attention from the audience and some intelligent questions were asked. Mark had answered as many as he could. Below are some of the Q&As as they were asked and answered in the community today.
Mark Zuckerberg’s Invitation : For the next hour I’ll be here answering your questions on Facebook. Our Townhall Q&As are an important way for me to hear what our community is thinking about. Comment below with your question and I’ll try to answer as many as I can in the next hour.
Q1: would like to know a unified theory of gravity and the other forces. Which of the big questions in science would you like to know the answer to and why?
Mark Zuckerberg : I’m most interested in questions about people. What will enable us to live forever? How do we cure all diseases? How does the brain work? How does learning work and how we can empower humans to learn a million times more?
I’m also curious about whether there is a fundamental mathematical law underlying human social relationships that governs the balance of who and what we all care about. I bet there is.
Q2 : My 10 year old however wants to ask you what you would take to a desert island with you if you could only take three things (fyi there is no WiFi there so no FB )
Mark Zuckerberg : That depends. Have we successfully delivered satellite connectivity through Internet.org yet? Because we’re working on this, and in the not too distant future, I’m pretty sure there will in fact be wifi on that island. In that case, I’ll bring my wife, my dog and my phone.
Otherwise, I guess I’d just bring my wife, my dog and a book.
Q3: Tell us more about the AI initiatives that Facebook are involved in.
Mark Zuckerberg : Most of our AI research is focused on understanding the meaning of what people share.
For example, if you take a photo that has a friend in it, then we should make sure that friend sees it. If you take a photo of a dog or write a post about politics, we should understand that so we can show that post and help you connect to people who like dogs and politics.
In order to do this really well, our goal is to build AI systems that are better than humans at our primary senses: vision, listening, etc.
For vision, we’re building systems that can recognize everything that’s in an image or a video. This includes people, objects, scenes, etc. These systems need to understand the context of the images and videos as well as whatever is in them.
For listening and language, we’re focusing on translating speech to text, text between any languages, and also being able to answer any natural language question you ask.
This is a pretty basic overview. There’s a lot more we’re doing and I’m looking forward to sharing more soon.
Q4: What’s your definition of happiness? And how has it evolved over a period of time as you grew up?
Mark Zuckerberg : Great question. To me, happiness is doing something meaningful that helps people and that I believe in with people I love.
I think lots of people confuse happiness with fun. I don’t believe it is possible to have fun every day. But I do believe it is possible to do something meaningful that helps people people every day.
As I’ve grown up, I’ve gained more appreciation for my close relationships — my wife, my partners at work, my close friends. Nobody builds something by themselves. Long term relationships are very important.
Q5: How will you react if you woke up next morning and there is no Facebook ?
Mark Zuckerberg : I’d build it
Q6: What do you think Facebook’s role is in news? I’m delighted to see Instant Articles and that it includes a business model to help support good journalism. What’s next?
Mark Zuckerberg : People discover and read a lot of news content on Facebook, so we spend a lot of time making this experience as good as possible.
One of the biggest issues today is just that reading news is slow. If you’re using our mobile app and you tap on a photo, it typically loads immediately. But if you tap on a news link, since that content isn’t stored on Facebook and you have to download it from elsewhere, it can take 10+ seconds to load. People don’t want to wait that long, so a lot of people abandon news before it has loaded or just don’t even bother tapping on things in the first place, even if they wanted to read them.
That’s easy to solve, and we’re working on it with Instant Articles. When news is as fast as everything else on Facebook, people will naturally read a lot more news. That will be good for helping people be more informed about the world, and it will be good for the news ecosystem because it will deliver more traffic.
It’s important to keep in mind that Instant Articles isn’t a change we make by ourselves. We can release the format, but it will take a while for most publishers to adopt it. So when you ask about the “next thing”, it really is getting Instant Articles fully rolled out and making it the primary news experience people have.
Q7: Can I get a intern at facebook for networking?
Mark Zuckerberg : Sure, anyone can apply to work at Facebook. Here are our openings: https://www.facebook.com/careers