The Download: the origins of life, and building Facebook's AI empire

In 2006, the U.S. patent office received a filing for "an automatically generated display that contains information relevant to a user about another user of a social network." Rather than forcing people to search through disorganized" content for items of interest, the system would seek to generate a list of "relevant" information in a "preferred order." The listed authors were "Zuckerberg et al." and the product was the News Feed. The platform's recommendation systems were still in their infancy, and as an algorithm, it wasn't much. By 2010, the company was looking beyond the crude system to recommend content based on machine learning and user behavior.