Reading robots beat humans in Stanford test

Artificial intelligence programs built by Alibaba (BABA) and Microsoft (MSFT) have beaten humans on a Stanford University reading comprehension test. "This is the first time that a machine has outperformed humans on such a test," Alibaba said in a statement Monday. The test was devised by artificial intelligence experts at Stanford to measure computers' growing reading abilities. Alibaba's software was the first to beat the human score. Related: Google is opening an artificial intelligence center in China Luo Si, the chief scientist of natural language processing at the Chinese company's AI research group, called the milestone "a great honor," but also acknowledged that it is likely lead to a significant number of workers losing their jobs to machines.