(Telecompaper) Facebook has announced plans to open its first artificial intelligence (AI) lab outside the US. The new lab in Paris, France, will start with six research scientists, growing to 12 by year-end. CTO Mike Schorepfer told BBC News that the AI work being done in industry complements the work being done by academic researchers and that the company's work in AI research is still relatively early. Facebook's head of AI research, Yann LeCun, said there is no need to worry about reported risks of AI in the short term. "We have a long way to go to make machines as intelligent as we'd like them to be, and there are technical hurdles that we don't yet know how to solve. Human-level AI is very far down the line. It will be several decades," enough time "to talk about the ethics." LeCun added that Paris was chosen for its high concentration of AI researchers. Facebook's AI lab in the US opened in December 2013 and now employs over 40 researchers.