In an interview with Wired, Facebook's head of AI, Jerome Pesenti, theorized that the development of artificial intelligence and machine learning is …

Sophia, the robot is a bit of non-persona non grata in the AI community. The creators of Sophia, Hanson robotics, regularly exaggerate the robots abilities and pretend that it's basically human and alive rather an a form of unnerving automation. For researchers in the AI field, this has been an annoyance for a long time. However, since artificial intelligence is currently a hot topic globally, Sophia is getting worldwide coverage. Researchers are angry that the Hanson Robotics team is misleading the people about what AI can and cannot do.

The first genuinely impressive AI assistant may well have a Canadian accent. Facebook announced today that it is tapping into Canada's impressive supply of artificial-intelligence talent and expertise by creating a major AI research center in Montreal. Several big recent advances in AI can be traced back to Canadian research labs, and Facebook is hoping that the new lab may help it take advantage of whatever comes next. The new center will focus, in particular, on an area of AI known as reinforcement learning (see "10 Breakthrough Technologies 2017: Reinforcement Learning"). The center will seek to apply this and other novel approaches to language, with the aim of producing more coherent and useful virtual assistants, says Yann LeCun, director of AI research at Facebook.