"For most of my career as a researcher people believed that it was hopeless, that you’ll never achieve human-level AI. ... thinking we’re already there is [now] a smaller error than thinking we’ll never get there. ... If I tell people I'm using probabilistic logic to do reasoning on how best to prune the backward chaining inference trees that arise in our logic engine, they have no idea what I'm talking about. But if I show them a beautiful smiling robot face, then they get the feeling that AGI may indeed be nearby and viable. ... What does a startup get out of having massive international publicity? This is obvious."