Microsoft says its AI can describe images 'as well as people do'

Describing an image accurately, and not just like a clueless robot, has long been the goal of AI. In 2016, Google said its artificial intelligence could caption images almost as well as humans, with 94 percent accuracy. Now Microsoft says it's gone even further: Its researchers have built an AI system that's even more accurate than humans -- so much so that it now sits at the top of the leaderboard for the nocaps image captioning benchmark. Microsoft claims its two times better than the image captioning model it's been using since 2015. It's now offering the new captioning model as part of Azure's Cognitive Services, so any developer can bring it into their apps.