The AI Used To Sell You More Stuff Can Now Read Better Than A Human

For the first time ever, two AI systems built to process and respond to human speech (created, respectively, by Microsoft and Chinese commerce giant Alibaba) outscored humans in a reading comprehension test designed by Stanford researchers. The Stanford Question Answering Dataset, SQuAD, is composed of a staggering 100,000 questions following brief reading passages. Created in 2016, SQuAD is used as a benchmark to measure AI's progress in natural language processing. After reading excerpts from Wikipedia, the systems answer questions such as "What is the Latin name for Black Death?" and "How many actors have played Doctor Who?" Alibaba's AI score was 82.44, and Microsoft's was 82.650, with humans trailing behind them both at 82.304. Alibaba's system may have finished second, but it's more than qualified to handle its day job: Working in sales. The company's AI team reportedly works closely with the developers of Ali Xiaomi, a chat bot that answers customer questions about products.