This novel starts out very tritely. None of the individual elements are utterly impossible, but Thomson fails to make them believable. I am willing to believe, for the purposes of a story, that a self-learning Artificial Intelligence could be created by a lone worker, in spite of it being illegal. That such an intelligence could learn to use a body in a matter of days is absurd.
Humans take years to do so.
It is implausible that an entity who came to self-awareness by such a different route than humans would behave so much like them. Much of the action takes place among the homeless. The characters act like characters in a book, not like real people. She felt more than a little sorry for humans. If this was the closest they could get to each other, they must be very lonely indeed.