Can computers ever beat humans in a reading test It just happened - MarketWatch

Call it one giant leap for robot-kind. Alibaba BABA-0.51% said Monday that its artificial intelligence, or deep neural network model, used to help service customers in its billion-dollar'Singles Day' shopping events, beat out humans for the first time in a top reading comprehension test. Alibaba's Institute of Data Science and Technologies (iDST) said its AI model scored an 82.44 when it came to providing exact answers using the Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD) on Jan. 11. The machine reading-comprehension test has over 100,000 questions that an AI program -- or a human -- tries to answer after reading a related article on Wikipedia. The questions range from simple ones such as "Where did the Super Bowl 50 take place?" to posers such as "What is the primary purpose of chloroplasts?" Microsoft Research Asia's AI model scored even higher -- 82.650 -- on the reading test, putting it at joint first with Alibaba, according to the SQuAD ranking.