.png){kind=logo}
Mark Zuckerberg, was born on 14 May 1984 in White Plains, and he is the co-founder of Meta (META), which was formerly known as Facebook. Passionate about social networking since childhood, Zuckerberg started working on Facebook in his Harvard dorm room and dropped out of the university after his sophomore year to fully concentrate on the company. Consequently, Zuckerberg became a billionaire because the number of Facebook users reached more than two billion people. He is a very good computer programmer and philanthropist.
Mark Elliot Zuckerberg, was born on the 14th of May, 1984, in New York to Edward, a dentist, and Karen, a psychiatrist. Growing up in a Jewish reform home with his three sisters, Arielle, Randi, and Donna, Zuckerberg’s Jewish roots originated from his ancestors, who were from Austria and Germany. He married Priscilla Chan on May 19, 2012. The couple got their first child, Maxima, on December 1, 2015, with her having the Chinese name Chen Mingyu, and the second one was born in August 2017 and named August. Zuckerberg is famous for creating Facebook along with being one of the leaders of the modern technological revolution.
Growing up, Mark Zuckerberg showed significant aptitude and passion for computer-related operations. At about 12, he used Atari BASIC to create a messaging platform known as “Zucknet” which his father used in his dental practice to enhance communication between the receptionist and his father. It was also a communication tool used within families to issue and receive instructions, share information, and coordinate activities among its members. Furthermore, Zuckerberg and his friends developed computer games for entertainment. To fuel his burgeoning interest, his parents hired private tutor David Newman, who met Zuckerberg once a week. Newman cited the difficulty of trying to keep up with the prodigious talent as Zuckerberg started taking graduate-level courses at the nearby Mercy College.
He later joined Phillips Exeter Academy and was good in fencing and received a diploma in classics though retained his interest in computerizing. He created Synapse, a music software like Pandora while in high school, which led to companies such as AOL and Microsoft showing interest in acquiring the product.
Mark studied at Ardsley Public High Schools, New York, from 1996-2002. During this period at Ardsley, he showcased a determined interest in programming and computers, which improved over time due to the established computer facility at the Institution. Over time Mark improved his skills in computer science and general technological applications that would later prove to be valuable as he co-founded Facebook together with his college roommates.
After he graduated from Ardsley High School in 2002. Mark Zuckerberg joined Harvard University to pursue a double major in Computer Science and Psychology. During this period, Mark and four of his college dormmates envisioned the idea of creating a social media platform that would shift virtual communication globally. Mark did not stay for long at Harvard, as programming for Facebook started in 2003. He left the college while in the 2nd year of his degree.
In February 2004, Mark Zuckerberg launched thefacebook.com (renamed Facebook in 2005), a site where Harvard students could share their information and photos. Within two weeks, half the student body had joined. Zuckerberg’s roommates, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes helped expand the site to other campuses. Facebook gained popularity for its focus on real names and connections, allowing users to network through their friends and friends of friends, creating what Zuckerberg termed the “social graph.” In the summer of 2004, Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes moved Facebook's headquarters to Palo Alto, California. Zuckerberg secured seed funding from venture capitalist Peter Thiel and dropped out of Harvard to focus on the company, becoming its CEO and president.
In May 2005 Facebook received its first major infusion of venture capital ($12.7 million). Four months later Facebook opened to registration by high-school students. Meanwhile, foreign colleges and universities also began to sign up, and by September 2006 anyone with an e-mail address could join a regional network based on where he or she lived. Around that time, Zuckerberg declined a $1 billion buyout offer from Yahoo! In 2007, Facebook secured $240 million from Microsoft for a 1.6% stake, and two years later, Digital Sky Technologies bought a 1.96% share for $200 million. By 2008, Zuckerberg’s net worth was estimated at $1.5 billion. Following Facebook's IPO in 2012, his net worth surged to over $19 billion. In October 2021, Facebook rebranded its parent company as Meta Platforms, shifting its focus to the "metaverse," a virtual reality space where users can interact in immersive environments.
Mark Zuckerberg has invested heavily in AI through Meta Platforms, with several important initiatives and business investments.
In March 2024, Mark Zuckerberg personally called AI researchers at Google's DeepMind for a recruitment at Meta. This is how serious the company was in developing its AI strategy. For them, Meta used very unusual hiring practices; offering roles without formal interviews, and inflating salary offers to attract top talent.
In July 2024, Meta made an open-source approach to AI by launching AI models such as LLaMA, for Large Language Model Meta AI. This strategy was meant to make powerful AI tools more accessible. It would pit Meta against well-consolidated players like OpenAI and Google.
In June 2024, Meta announced new AI-powered capabilities for WhatsApp to improve the efficiency of businesses. The updates put a lot of focus on automating customer interactions and giving businesses more advanced tools to manage communications, including building better chatbots and AI-driven customer service. These innovations are targeted at simplifying operations and helping businesses "get business done" more effectively by making WhatsApp the core of all communication means. The new AI features further underscore Meta's continued commitment to embedding AI within its popular services.
Mark Zuckerberg announced Meta's AI plans in January 2024 by detailing how the company intends to buy about 600,000 GPUs through the end of the year, including about 350,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs. That will be a base of infrastructure for AI services and models being developed, including those aimed at General Artificial Intelligence capabilities.
In September 2023, Meta introduced the latest Ray-Ban-Meta Smart Glasses. These smart glasses combine fashion and technology: it's possible to shoot photos and videos, broadcast events in real-time, and use all of Meta's AI capabilities hands-free. With improvements to audio and camera, better integration with Meta's ecosystem boosts augmented reality.
In September 2023, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative launched an ambitious AI effort for progressing biomedical insights. This project focuses on using AI to enhance cellular research for quicker discoveries in biology and medicine. CZI seeks to change just how scientists comprehend cellular functions and diseases by combining AI-driven tools and data, with the intent of fostering innovative solutions to accelerate health improvements.
In August 2023, Meta released Code Llama, an AI tool developed to enhance coding workflows. This is a large language model tool that uses text-based prompts for code generation and discussion. It supports languages such as Java, PHP, C#, and Python and is free to use under the Llama2 community license for research, personal, and commercial applications. Code Llama Code completion or debugging. Available in three sizes: 7B, 13B, and 34B parameters. The 34B model yields better code assistance but is more GPU-intensive.
Imagine with Meta AI, in December 2023, Meta announced several new AI features, one of which was "Imagine with Meta AI," a generative AI model for creating images. Trained on 1.1 billion public images from Facebook and Instagram, this lets users create images from text prompts. Available first on Meta's chat apps, its popularity moved it out to a standalone website: imagine.meta.com. The tool generates four images, watermark included, visible at 1280x1280 pixels, to ensure transparency in the images it makes. In addition, Meta plans to add an invisible watermark for further improvements in traceability for AI-generated images.
In December 2023, Meta and IBM announced an AI alliance that would help accelerate artificial intelligence development. What the collaboration does is bring both companies together to realize the potential of large-scale AI model development and make the AI infrastructure better. This deal will bring together Meta's experience with AI models such as Llama and combine it with IBM's computing and enterprise solutions to power innovation into a set of emerging areas, including natural language processing and enterprise AI solutions. The alliance is expected to improve AI-powered services for businesses while increasing Meta's leadership in AI technology.
In April 2022, Meta acquired Presize.ai, a startup dealing in AI-powered body measurement solutions for online apparel retailers. Presize.ai leverages computer vision and deep learning by having users find the right size of clothing through the analysis of videos of themselves for the perfect fit reducing returns. This acquisition by Meta is expected to fall in line with the company's efforts to enhance its e-commerce and AI capabilities and support more personalized shopping experiences across its ecosystem.
Mark Zuckerberg, one of the co-founders of Meta Platforms is among the most popular personalities in the tech business fraternity, with a real-time net worth of US$177. 3 billion as of September of the year 2024. With his 1. 38% ownership in Meta, this places Zuckerberg among the major people who directly influenced the formation of the world’s digital landscape. Taking the fourth position in the list of the world’s richest people, its influence is not limited to social networking sites but to virtual reality and artificial intelligence. The social media tycoon Zuckerberg goes on making changes in business and technology.
Mark Zuckerberg, the founder, chairman as well as the CEO of Meta Platforms, Inc., created Facebook in the year 2004. The company became one of the world’s largest social media companies, which bought Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp. Formally known as Facebook, the firm was rebranded as Meta in October of 2021 and now works on bringing content to screens beyond the standard screen such as augmented and virtual reality. Zuckerberg, therefore, continues to be the driving force behind Meta, handling issues such as content moderation and user protection. As of January 2024, Meta continued to train its newest generative AI model known as Llama 3 for AI research related to artificial general intelligence (AGI).
Mark Zuckerberg launched Meta into a new era in 2024 by promising to transition from resolving controversies to innovation and product development. More aggressively, he told investors the company would push on with its vision and fight head-on against all criticisms.
In 2024, Mark Zuckerberg responded to the Biden administration's 2021 pressure on Meta for the censorship of COVID-19 content, saying that it was a mistake and that he would resist such pressure in the future. This is in contrast with Zuckerberg's usually product-focused mindset and aggressive pushback against external attacks.
The social media giant was accused of repressing the messages displayed against Israel and of showing support for Palestine in 2021. During the conflict about the property dispute at Sheikh Jarrah in 2021, Facebook was accused of deleting hundreds of posts criticizing the Israeli government. Several senior officials of Facebook apologized to the Palestinian Prime Minister on this incident for repressing the pro-Palestinian voices.
In October 2021, The Intercept exposed a secret blacklist of "dangerous individuals and organizations" maintained by Facebook. The list labeled censorship in the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region as much more restrictive compared to USA standards. Both the critics and scholars argue that the blacklist and guidelines muzzle free discussion and enforce rules unevenly.
In 2018, Facebook overhauled the News Feed to prioritize 'meaningful social interactions,' as it did then, which means it only underlined the content from close friends and family. Immediately, such a move came under fire because it would reduce the visibility of news and public content, and does not efficiently solve the issues of misinformation, and engagement manipulation among others.
In 2016, Mark Zuckerberg's admission that Facebook was a media company was slammed by many as little more than too little, too late. Many critics felt this was a way to shift blame on the hoaxes and biased information that spread from the site rather than fix any of the system-wide site problems. They said that Zuckerberg's stance did little to deal with bigger issues presented by the platform in terms of what it meant for the future of media and public discourse.
In 2015, it was reported that Facebook has a policy to censor anything related to Kurdish opposition against Turkey, such as maps of Kurdistan, flags of Kurdish armed terrorist groups (such as PKK and YPG), and criticism of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of Turkey and Facebook banned and also removed content regarding the Kashmir dispute.
In 2011, Privacy organizations filed complaints with the FTC regarding Facebook's policy of sharing user data like home addresses and mobile numbers with third-party developers, particularly for children under 18.
