Facebook’s head of AI really hates Sophia the robot (and with good reason)
Sophia the robot is a bit of a non-persona non grata in the AI community. Its creators, Hanson Robotics, consistently exaggerate the bot’s abilities, pretending that it’s “basically alive,” rather than just a particularly unnerving automaton. For AI researchers, this has long been an annoyance, but as artificial intelligence becomes more of a global hot topic and Sophia is given more and more coverage, they’re angry that Hanson Robotics is misleading the public about what AI can and cannot do.
Facebook’s head of AI research, Yann LeCun, has been one of the company’s more vocal critics. After Business Insider published an interview with Sophia that played into the fantasy of Sophia as a semi-sentient entity, LeCun called the whole thing…
