Maluuba is an increasingly rare beast in the burgeoning world of artificial intelligence. Founded in 2012, the Waterloo-headquartered startup has yet to be acquired by one of the many massive tech companies investing heavily in AI. Nor has Maluuba been raided for its talent, which is very much in demand. Rather, the small artificial intelligence startup is now home to more than 50 employees and growing -- and for prospective hires weighing opportunities with larger firms, co-founder Mohamed Musbah thinks he has a pretty good pitch. Maluuba is trying to train computers to understand language, whether in conversation with a human, or when reading a document or other source of text.

While AI is getting powerful very quickly, and more and more jobs are threatened with automation, we are not yet at the point of science fiction where we are communicating as equals with robots. Sure, some robots already understand the concepts of trust and regret, but machines can't yet think, reason, or communicate at an advanced level. Microsoft's Tay Bot--which tried to learn humanity from reading Twitter and quickly became an angry racist--serves as a clear example of the limitations of today's technology. She can can give you the weather forecast for your zip code but can't describe her feelings on mass incarceration or even comb through the fine print of that contract you've been asked to sign. Teaching machines to think, and behave, more like us is what Mo Musbah and the team at Maluuba are working on.

Maluuba launched its first Siri-like personal assistant at TC Disrupt San Francisco four years ago. Since then, the company has raised 11 million and has licensed its technology to a number of handset manufacturers that now use it to power their own personal-assistant features. As Maluuba's head of product Mo Musbah told me, the company spent the last two years doubling down on how it could utilize deep learning in the context of natural language processing. To do so, it recently opened an R&D office in Montreal, for example. As Musbah told me, "our vision there is to build one of the largest deep learning labs in the world," so the company is definitely not lacking in ambition.

It's hard to find someone who isn't a fan of "Game of Thrones." The TV show, which returns Sunday, has reached peaks of popularity that few shows do, and draws in fans of all shapes and sizes -- even computers. Maluuba, a Canadian startup, posted a YouTube video on Friday showing its artificial-intelligence software reading the synopsis for the fifth season of "Game of Thrones'" and immediately knowing all of the show's plot lines. It's the equivalent to a human, let's call him "John" for this example, who knows nothing about the show, has never seen it, takes one look at a Wikipedia page and instantaneously knows everything that's happening. "Who stabbed Jon Snow?" the Maluuba engineer asks the AI software.