Zuckerberg wants to be the Stephen Hawking of social relations


“I’m most interested in questions about people,” the Facebook chief said Tuesday. “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,” he said. “I bet there is.”


In addition to a social law, Zuckerberg said he was interested in how the brain works, how learning works, and how humans can be empowered to learn “a million times more.”

When it comes to learning, the Q&A helped to explain Facebook’s growing interest in AI, or artificial intelligence. Earlier this month, Facebook opened a research center in Paris to advance efforts begun a little over a year ago in AI-based image recognition, natural language processing and speech recognition applications. Researchers in Paris will work with teams in Menlo Park, California, and New York on various projects.

Those efforts are partly aimed at understanding the meaning of what people share and post on Facebook, Zuckerberg said Tuesday. Divining that meaning could improve the relevance of posts in people’s News Feeds. Also, being able to build computers that could understand what’s in an image and describe it to a blind person “would be pretty amazing,” Zuckerberg said.


Meanwhile, for listening and language in AI, Facebook is focusing on converting speech to text and translating text between languages, and answering people’s natural-language queries, Zuckerberg said.

Facebook recently released a separate app that uses technology based in part on work done by its AI research team, called Moments. The app lets users share photos privately and uses facial recognition to organize photos based on who is in them.

Zuckerberg also outlined his vision for the future of communication, one in which people wear devices that augment reality and allow them to send “full, rich thoughts” to each other just by thinking of something. This would be a communication technology coming after new immersive experiences developed through virtual reality, he said.



“Staying in shape is very important,” the 31-year-old CEO said.

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