ANTIVIRUS SOFTWARE THAT ASKS FOR YOUR NUDES

When we talk about motives behind any cyberattack, it is mostly money; a case in point is the ransomware – it locks your PC or encrypts your data and demands a ransom (in Bitcoins) to let go off the computer or decrypt the data. So basically, money is the main motive behind all ransomware attacks which have happened so far. But, this does not stand true for a recently spotted malware called nRansomware; it demands something else – the victim’s nude photos. Yes, you read that right.

nRansomware, unlike most of its counterparts, does not encrypt the victim’s data but blocks access to the infected computer. Reportedly, the attacker demands at least 10 nude pictures of the victim in exchange of a code to unlock the system. The attacker also says that these pictures will be verified but without mentioning how. Below is a snapshot of the ransom note.

This ransomware-with-a-twist was spotted by the MalwareHunterTeam – a research group focused on ransomware. While this threat might look like a gross prank, it does appear to be legit – as verified by VirusTotal.

At the moment, nRansomware affects only Windows users.

What can you do to stay safe?

1. Do not pay the ransom even if it is not money. Your personal information is equally valuable when it lands on the black market.
2. Do not click on links or download attachments in unknown, unexpected or unwanted emails.
3. Do not click on pop-up ads in unknown or less popular websites.
4. Keep your OS and software up-to-date.
5. Use an antivirus software that offers multilayered security against ransomware and other online threats.

AFRICA: A Digital Colony

Look! Africa is fast becoming a digital colony without her realizing it.Am deeply afraid with the way we are going,that one day if nothing is done, we will wake up and see one smart kid in say China remotely controlling the economies of nations in Africa!Yes,it is as bad as that, if you have keenly followed trends of events happening especially in the cyberspace.And frankly this demands a state of emergency by African Union.In my opinion; this is the new war we need to fight in Africa with code warriors for digital independence!

Africa,one of the largest continents of the world,blessed with great human and material resources no doubt,it becomes unfortunate that even with these abundant resources,our nations are still very poor,underdeveloped and living in the third world.When i look at emerging economies and the vintage role Africa should play, i say to myself, why is Africa still sleeping.Are we really ready for the coming wealth and power transfer? How are we positioned?

We seem to become eternally clueless about technology, its place in African development and what the future holds.My fear is that in this ew knowledge economy driven by technologies,Africa has started playing the same ignorant and i –don’t- care role they played during the Agricultural and industrial age which left us with hunger, poverty and lack.It even took our self esteem away.In this digital age,the consequences cannot be imagined because of the speed associated with digital advancement and if nothing is done now, Africa might never recover from this digital colonisation.

I am writing this with the mind that if Africa can realize what she has, find ways to develop the continent using technology as the driving force,we will be the next continent to beat in the global arena of technology competitiveness and overcome this digital enslavement!It is clear that any nation or continent that cannot develop and grow its own technologies has no future and will depend on others.They will hardly regain their freedom.

Our over dependency and consumption of technologies(with none made in Africa)have left us as a digital colony while we plough the fields of other smart nations making them Digital giants and singing their songs in Africa.Digital colonization enslaves Africa in her domain making her fully dependent on the global IT savvy nations for all her technology needs, thereby compromising her critical resources and her sovereignty without her knowing.

Chris Uwaje in his book-e-Knowledge-Time is running out!aptly captures the entire scenario of a digital colony,he said”some shortsighted nations will wake-up at midnight one day,in the early decades of this century and suddenly realize that they have been digitally colonized.The resultant effect of this will seriously impact on the future generations to come.It simply means that the entire life,culture and sovereignty of a nation and her citizenry have been unknowingly to the people traded off and taken over by IT-smart, powerful and knowledge- centered information force and/or forces on the globe.”

The following points to the fact that we have been digitally colonised:Technology Products Consumption in Africa,Technology and Security in Africa,Data storage and management in Africa,Technology Entrepreneurship in Africa.I look around Africa and i see no technology product of African origin that is serving the tech needs of the people ,not to talk of ones for export,still our technology consumption is very high in Africa.Our countries have turned into a digital dumping ground for used and out dated tech stuffs.

Right now as you are reading this, if you are in Africa, look around where you are,can you identify any Made in Africa Tech Product?That is how deep the truth of the matter is.From the websites we visit daily to the cars we drive,the computers and laptops,servers, our mobile phones with the SIM cards,you name them, to even the smallest of gadgets.They are shipped to us from other nations.None is made in Africa and yet we take so much delight in promoting and associating ourselves with the Global brands of other continents; have you ever given this a thought?It’s even a bigger shame when you find out that most times it is Africans in diaspora that drive those tech developments around the world,why can’t we use our knowledge and experience to develop our Africa via technology.I see many African intellectuals all over the world, with PhDs with no invention to their credit, no contribution whatever to the development of Africa. All they do is speak and give speeches at forums without any thought of how to move the continent forward.I see them as academic derelicts of African descent!I began to imagine-What do Africans use their PhDs for?To suppress their brothers and sisters? While others improve the lives of their brothers and sisters in other continents.

Yes,i know there are several reasons why no one should live in Africa,from bad government to bad policies but those are the same reasons that keep bringing investors(oyibos) into Africa to explore what the people do not know exist with them.True development in Africa can only be done by Africans.

Let’s briefly look at Security and Technology in Africa,since we cannot develop our technologies in Africa;our technology needs for National security and critical information management in Africa like in our central and commercial banks,stock exchanges,Government information system,Military and defense information system, other vital information of the state,who handles them?What software run them? Many interesting questions that can come out of this.These important aspect of security in Africa are always outsourced to India,China, US or other tech savvy nations.For example,Nigeria launched her second satellites with critical information management outsourced to China because we don’t have what it takes to handle such.That has clearly put us at the mercy of China and the government seems not to know the implications of such in time to come.It has very grave consequences and cracks on the sovereignty and the ability of Africa to really protect,control and manage her territories. The Governments have failed to make the needed investment to grow her local technology, at last they lose control of their countries and at the end everyone is asking why African nations are war-torn.

I watch with keen interest the controlling effect of technologies in developed economies ,this have made the government of such tech savvy nations fully interested in these technology companies and their well being.They are seen as a national pride and they represent the future of those countries. Their government goes ahead to protect them against international influences, i remember vividly when Google was having issues in China, it was not only a fight for Google but American government plays key role in that.We have also witnessed the Canadian government throw her full support at RIM/Blackberrry as their national pride.Across the African countries, where lies our national pride in technology?Which brand can we export to the world that can stand as a global brand in technology,that’s what am talking about.We have no pride in Technology all over the world,we are all dependants and that is digital slavery.

In recent times following the exponential growth in Mobile related businesses in Africa,We have all agreed that the future of Africa lies in Mobile,yes,I agree but how many African companies will benefit directly from these mobile boom.It is clear that the people that will directly benefit are the equipment manufacturers(like Nokia, Samsung,Blackberry and others), Software and application developers then the network providers.Which among these have Africa entrepreneurs positioned themselves to benefit from?

A deeper look into this subject brings us to the question:How is the Internet exchanges in Africa developed?Do we have efficient Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) to route our internet traffic and data carrying our critical resources and information?The Internet Exchange Point is an important infrastructure to be considered in national development.

The most worrisome is that this negative effect is handed down from generations to generations;the young generation of African Youths are the ones to lead the change and make things right despite the daunting challenges.We cannot leave Africa the way we met her,We need to take our destinies in our hands.I applaud several tech based initiatives being powered by Young people across Africa,from Kenya,Ghana,South Africa,Egypt,Nigeria, Zambia,Cameroon to other nations in Africa.In all of these, we should understand where we are now,where we need to be and how to get there.We should also know the type of Start- ups we need in Africa right now to make the needed impact.Startups that can put us in the world map among the comity of nations like Facebook,Google, Twitter etc they are not there to fight their government.I have full conviction that African youths have great potentials that can change the world if harnessed and given the right environment.We need to start encouraging more young people to study Physics, Mathematics, Engineering, Software development, Computer Science and related courses.We have dearth of competent professionals in these areas.

I won’t conclude this without suggesting a few things that we need to do now to avert this perpetual digital enslavement.Africa urgently needs her own technologies,technology companies of global repute and a technology work force to handle all her tech needs.The African Union should see technology as a tool that will leapfrog Africa’s development and therefore develop a pragmatic road map for its achievement.The government of African nations should develop policies aimed at developing their nations through technology.They should make special preferences for Africa owned technology businesses and give them the support,protection and encouragement to grow into a global brand.

Investment in technology development should be a deliberate and conscious effort by all Africans.Our leaders and people in government who have stolen public funds should also have the mind to invest in Africa in the area of technology development rather than stash the money in faraway Swiss boosting other economies.

There should be several organisations,government,individuals and businesses who will provide grants,venture funds to young Africans to help them grow their ideas.This is really lacking in Africa.And there lies our future. And finally our orientation about ourselves should change,we are not inferior in anyway!Viva Africa!!

THE BUS THAT RUNS ON HUMAN WASTE (FEACES AND URINE)

When you take out the trash or flush the toilet - do you ever stop to think about the vast amounts of energy you’re actually throwing away? Probably not - and that’s okay! Here to think about those scores of precious potential energy for us is green-as-can-be waste treatment company GENeco, and its ground-breaking BioBus. That’s right, the BioBus runs on trash and sewage. Already more than just a pipe dream, the first BioBus is currently active in the United Kingdom, shuttling passengers back and forth every day from Bristol Airport.
So how does it work? First, a GENeco waste disposal plant treats both food waste and sewage, using a natural process which mimics the human digestive system. The result is biomethane - the purified gas which fuels the BioBus, along with 8,300 UK homes every day. On a full tank of gas, the bus can travel 200 miles - not bad for what is essentially broken down unwanted food and sewage!
As one of GENeco’s founders says in this video showing the BioBus in action, “not everything we flush goes to waste.”

HOW TO HACK SOMEONE'S CELL PHONE

Do you ever wonder how all these celebrities continue to have their private photos spread all over the internet? While celebrities' phones and computers are forever vulnerable to attacks, the common folk must also be wary. No matter how careful you think you were went you sent those "candid" photos to your ex, with a little effort and access to public information, your pictures can be snagged, too. Here's how.

Cloud Storage

Apple's iCloud service provides a hassle free way to store and transfer photos and other media across multiple devices.

While the commercial exemplifies the G-rated community of iPhone users, there are a bunch of non-soccer moms that use their iPhones in a more..."free spirited" mindset. With Photo Stream enabled (requires OS X Lion or later, iOS 5 or later), pictures taken on your iPhone go to directly to your computer and/or tablet, all while being stored in the cloud.

If you think the cloud is safe, just ask Gizmodo reporter Mat Honan. His iCloud account was hacked by someone who contacted Apple Support and requested a password reset by working around the security questions and using available information of Honan's social media accounts. The hacker remotely wiped all of Honan's devices and hijacked the Gizmodo Twitter account. Luckily for him, his photos were not of any concern to the hacker, but other people might not be so lucky.

Email

Email is one of the most used applications on a person's mobile device. While remotely hacking into someone's phone and gaining access to their system files and photos is extremely difficult, hacking into an email account is much easier. While MMS is usually the method of choice for those sending images over their phone, many people still use their email accounts for sharing files.

That's how some "intriguing" photos of Scarlett Johansson ended up all over the internet last year. The hacker simply found her email address by trying random iterations of her name in combination with common email clients like Gmail or Yahoo, and then used the forgotten password helper. After answering the security questions by using public information and scouring the internet, he gained access to her email account, which contained some of her photos.

Once a hacker has an email address, the information he or she now has access to has multiplied. Many people prefer paperless billing for their obligations, cell phone bills included. On those cell phone bills is the number of the account holder as well as a ton of other information like outgoing and incoming calls. And if you are using Gmail, you can send text messages right inside the email client, making it even easier to get in touch with other contacts.

So, while email hacking might not get you to the images directly, it can lead you to various sources of information that will get you closer to your goal, like a cell phone number. With your target's cell phone number in hand, those photos are within reach.

Cellular Provider

Sometimes the cellular provider is the weakest point of defense for a cell phone user. Both AT&T and Verizon allow user ID's to be the customers wireless number. If you have the number of the phone, you can use the "forgot my password" feature to request for a temp password, or even change the password altogether by either entering a 4 digit pin code, crackable by brute force, or by answering a few security questions.

Studies have shown that most people are terrible at choosing PINs, so you may not even have to use brute force—just try the list of most common ones that people use. Once inside the account, you have access to all the usage and data the phone has sent or received in the latest billing period.

Spoofing

With access to the numbers a cell phone has contacted and access to the text messages that have been sent from it, it's not too hard to spoof someone's number. Instead of trying to steal the photos off the phone, you can trick them into sending them directly to you. There are a bunch of cell phone spoofs and Caller ID apps you can use to make your number appear to be someone else's.

While none of these methods are guaranteed, there's a good chance that one of them (or a combination of a few) will work, unless your target is more security savvy than the average person. Most of us give away more information than we know online, and it only takes one opportunity-minded individual to take advantage of it.

If you do decide to give it a shot, though, just remember: hacking into someone's email or cell phone accounts is not only in the moral grey area, it's also completely illegal, so proceed with caution.

A Note from Mark Zuckerberg on How he Built Jarvis-his Artificial Intelligence (AI) Assistant

A Note from Mark Zuckerberg on How he Built Jarvis-his Artificial Intelligence (AI) Assistant

This is a note from Mark Zuckerberg on how he built Jarvis

My personal challenge for 2016 was to build a simple AI to run my home – like Jarvis in Iron Man.

My goal was to learn about the state of artificial intelligence – where we’re further along than peo- ple realize, where we’re still a long ways off, and so on. These challenges also always lead me to learn more than I expected, and this one gave me a better sense of all the internal technology Facebook engineers get to use, as well as a thorough overview of home automation.

So far this year, I’ve built a simple AI that I can talk to on my phone and computer, that can con- trol my home, including lights, temperature, appliances, music and security, that learns my tastes and patterns, that can learn new words and concepts, and that can even entertain Max. It uses several artificial intelligence techniques, including natural language processing, speech recogni- tion, face recognition, and reinforcement learning[, written in Python, PHP and Objective C]. In this note, I’ll explain what I built and what I learned along the way.

Getting Started: Connecting the Home

In some ways, this challenge was easier than I expected. In fact, my running challenge (I also set out to run 365 miles in 2016) took more total time. But one aspect that was much more compli- cated than I expected was simply connecting and communicating with all of the different systems in my home.

Before I could build any AI, I first needed to write code to connect these systems, which all speak different languages and protocols. We use a Crestron system for our lights, temperature and doors, a Sonos system with Spotify for music, a Samsung TV, a Nest cam for Max, and of course my work is connected to Facebook’s systems. I had to reverse engineer the APIs for some of these to even get to the point where I could issue a command from my computer to turn the lights on or get a song to play.

Further, most appliances aren’t even connected to the internet yet. It’s possible to control some of these using internet-connected power switches that let you turn the power on and off remotely.

But often that isn’t enough. For example, one thing I learned is it’s hard to find a toaster that will let you push the bread down while it’s powered off so you can automatically start toasting when the power goes on. I ended up finding an old toaster from the 1950s and rigging it up with a con- nected switch. Similarly, I found that connecting a food dispenser for Beast or a grey t-shirt can- non would require hardware modifications to work.

For assistants like Jarvis to be able to control everything in homes for more people, we need more devices to be connected and the industry needs to develop common APIs and standards for the devices to talk to each other.

Natural Language

Once I wrote the code so my computer could control my home, the next step was making it so I could talk to my computer and home the way I’d talk to anyone else. This was a two step process: first I made it so I could communicate using text messages, and later I added the ability to speak and have it translate my speech into text for it to read.

It started simple by looking for keywords, like ”bedroom”, ”lights”, and ”on” to determine I was telling it to turn the lights on in the bedroom. It quickly became clear that it needed to learn syn- onyms, like that ”family room” and ”living room” mean the same thing in our home. This meant building a way to teach it new words and concepts.

Understanding context is important for any AI. For example, when I tell it to turn the AC up in ”my office”, that means something completely different from when Priscilla tells it the exact same thing. That one caused some issues! Or, for example, when you ask it to make the lights dimmer or to play a song without specifying a room, it needs to know where you are or it might end up blasting music in Max’s room when we really need her to take a nap. Whoops.

Music is a more interesting and complex domain for natural language because there are too many artists, songs and albums for a keyword system to handle. The range of things you can ask it is also much greater. Lights can only be turned up or down, but when you say ”play X”, even subtle variations can mean many different things. Consider these requests related to Adele: ”play some-

one like you”, ”play someone like adele”, and ”play some adele”. Those sound similar, but each is a completely different category of request. The first plays a specific song, the second recommends an artist, and the third creates a playlist of Adele’s best songs. Through a system of positive and negative feedback, an AI can learn these differences.

The more context an AI has, the better it can handle open-ended requests. At this point, I mostly just ask Jarvis to ”play me some music” and by looking at my past listening patterns, it mostly nails something I’d want to hear. If it gets the mood wrong, I can just tell it, for example, ”that’s not light, play something light”, and it can both learn the classification for that song and adjust im- mediately. It also knows whether I’m talking to it or Priscilla is, so it can make recommendations based on what we each listen to. In general, I’ve found we use these more open-ended requests more frequently than more specific asks. No commercial products do this today, and this seems like a big opportunity.

Vision and Face Recognition

About one-third of the human brain is dedicated to vision, and there are many important AI prob- lems related to understanding what is happening in images and videos. These problems include tracking (eg is Max awake and moving around in her crib?), object recognition (eg is that Beast or a carpet in that room?), and face recognition (eg who is at the door?).

Face recognition is a particularly difficult version of object recognition because most people look relatively similar compared to telling apart two random objects – for example, a sandwich and a house. But Facebook has gotten very good at face recognition for identifying when your friends are in your photos. That expertise is also useful when your friends are at your door and your AI needs to determine whether to let themin.

To do this, I installed a few cameras at my door that can capture images from all angles. AI sys- tems today cannot identify people from the back of their heads, so having a few angles ensures we see the person’s face. I built a simple server that continuously watches the cameras and runs a two step process: first, it runs face detection to see if any person has come into view, and second, if it finds a face, then it runs face recognition to identify who the person is. Once it identifies the per- son, it checks a list to confirm I’m expecting that person, and if I am then it will let them in and tell me they’re here.

This type of visual AI system is useful for a number of things, including knowing when Max is awake so it can start playing music or a Mandarin lesson, or solving the context problem of know- ing which room in the house we’re in so the AI can correctly respond to context-free requests like ”turn the lights on” without providing a location. Like most aspects of this AI, vision is most use- ful when it informs a broader model of the world, connected with other abilities like knowing who your friends are and how to open the door when they’re here. The more context the system has, the smarter is gets overall.

Messenger Bot

I programmed Jarvis on my computer, but in order to be useful I wanted to be able to commu- nicate with it from anywhere I happened to be. That meant the communication had to happen through my phone, not a device placed in my home.

I started off building a Messenger bot to communicate with Jarvis because it was so much easier than building a separate app. Messenger has a simple framework for building bots, and it automat- ically handles many things for you – working across both iOS and Android, supporting text, image and audio content, reliably delivering push notifications, managing identity and permissions for different people, and more. [You can learn about the bot framework at messenger.com/platform.]

I can text anything to my Jarvis bot, and it will instantly be relayed to my Jarvis server and pro- cessed. I can also send audio clips and the server can translate them into text and then execute those commands. In the middle of the day, if someone arrives at my home, Jarvis can text me an image and tell me who’s there, or it can text me when I need to go do something.

One thing that surprised me about my communication with Jarvis is that when I have the choice of either speaking or texting, I text much more than I would have expected. This is for a number of reasons, but mostly it feels less disturbing to people around me. If I’m doing something that re- lates to them, like playing music for all of us, then speaking feels fine, but most of the time text feels more appropriate. Similarly, when Jarvis communicates with me, I’d much rather receive that over text message than voice. That’s because voice can be disruptive and text gives you more con- trol of when you want to look at it. Even when I speak to Jarvis, if I’m using my phone, I often prefer it to text or display its response.

This preference for text communication over voice communication fits a pattern we’re seeing with Messenger and WhatsApp overall, where the volume of text messaging around the world is grow- ing much faster than the volume of voice

communication. This suggests that future AI products cannot be solely focused on voice and will need a private messaging interface as well. Once you’re enabling private messaging, it’s much bet- ter to use a platform like Messenger than to build a new app from scratch. I have always been op- timistic about AI bots, but my experience with Jarvis has made me even more optimistic that we’ll all communicate with bots like Jarvis in the future.

Voice and Speech Recognition

Even though I think text will be more important for communicating with AIs than people realize, I still think voice will play a very important role too. The most useful aspect of voice is that it’s very fast. You don’t need to take out your phone, open an app, and start typing – you just speak.

To enable voice for Jarvis, I needed to build a dedicated Jarvis app that could listen continuously to what I say. The Messenger bot is great for many things, but the friction for using speech is way too much. My dedicated Jarvis app lets me put my phone on a desk and just have it listen. I could also put a number of phones with the Jarvis app around my home so I could talk to Jarvis in any room. That seems similar to Amazon’s vision with Echo, but in my experience, it’s surprising how frequently I want to communicate with Jarvis when I’m not home, so having the phone be the pri- mary interface rather than a home device seems critical.

I built the first version of the Jarvis app for iOS and I plan to build an Android version soon too. I hadn’t built an iOS app since 2012 and one of my main observations is that the toolchain we’ve built at Facebook since then for developing these apps and for doing speech recognition is very impressive.

Speech recognition systems have improved recently, but no AI system is good enough to under- stand conversational speech just yet. Speech recognition relies on both listening to what you say and predicting what you will say next, so structured speech is still much easier to understand than unstructured conversation.

Another interesting limitation of speech recognition systems – and machine learning systems more generally – is that they are more optimized for specific problems than most people realize. For example, understanding a person talking to a computer is subtly different problem from under- standing a person talking to another person. If you train a machine learning system on data from Google of people speaking to a search engine, it will perform relatively worse on Facebook at un- derstanding people talking to real people. In the case of Jarvis, training an AI that you’ll talk to at close range is also different from training a system you’ll talk to from all the way across the room, like Echo. These systems are more specialized than it appears, and that implies we are further off from having general systems than it might seem.

On a psychologic level, once you can speak to a system, you attribute more emotional depth to it than a computer you might interact with using text or a graphic interface. One interesting observa- tion is that ever since I built voice into Jarvis, I’ve also wanted to build in more humor. Part of this is that now it can interact with Max and I want those interactions to be entertaining for her, but part of it is that it now feels like it’s present with us. I’ve taught it fun little games like Priscilla or I can ask it who we should tickle and it will randomly tell our family to all go tickle one of us, Max or Beast.

There’s a lot more to explore with voice. The AI technology is just getting good enough for this tobethebasisofagreatproduct,anditwillgetmuchbetterinthenextfewyears.Atthesame

time, I think the best products like this will be ones you can bring with you anywhere and commu- nicate with privately as well.

Facebook Engineering Environment

As the CEO of Facebook, I don’t get much time to write code in our internal environment. I’ve never stopped coding, but these days I mostly build personal projects like Jarvis. I expected 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 recogni- tion, speech recognition, Messenger Bot Framework [messenger.com/platform] or iOS develop-

ment. The open source Nuclide [github.com/facebook/nuclide] packages we’ve built to work with GitHub’s Atom make development much easier. The Buck [buckbuild.com] build system we’ve developed to build large projects quickly also saved me a lot of time. Our open source FastText [github.com/facebookresearch/fastText] AI text classification tool is also a good one to check out, and if you’re interested in AI development, the whole Facebook Research [github.com/facebookresearch] GitHub repo is worth taking a look at.

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.

Building internal tools that make engineering more efficient is important to any technology com- pany, but this is something we take especially seriously. So I want to give a shout out to everyone on our infra and tools teams that make this so good.

Conclusions

Building Jarvis was a great intellectual challenge, and it gave me direct experience building AI tools in areas that are important for our future.

I’ve previously predicted that within 5-10 years we’ll have AI systems that are more accurate than ours for each of our human senses – vision, hearing, touch, etc, as well as things like language. It’s impressive how powerful the state of the art for these tools is becoming, and this year makes me more confident in my prediction.

At the same time, we are still far off from understanding how learning works. Everything I did this year – natural language, face recognition, speech recognition and so on – are all variants of the same fundamental pattern recognition techniques. We know how to show a computer many ex- amples of something so it can recognize it accurately, but we still do not know how to take an idea from one domain and apply it to something completelydifferent.

To put that in perspective, I spent about 100 hours building Jarvis this year, and now I have a pretty good system that understands me and can do a lot of things. But even if I spent 1,000 more hours, I probably would not be able to build a system that could learn completely new skills on its own – unless I made some fundamental breakthrough in the state of AI along the way.

In a way, AI is both closer and farther off than we imagine. AI is closer to being able to do more powerful things than most people expect – driving cars, curing diseases, discovering planets, under- standing media. Those will each have a great impact on the world, but we’re still figuring out what real intelligence is.

Overall, this was a great challenge. These challenges have a way of teaching me more than I ex- pected at the beginning. This year I thought I’d learn about AI, and I also learned about home au- tomation and Facebook’s internal technology too. That’s what’s so interesting about these chal- lenges. Thanks for following along with this challenge and I’m looking forward to sharing next year’s challenge in a few weeks.