Microsoft, Alibaba AI programs beat humans in a Stanford reading test

Two artificial intelligence programs created by Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba and Microsoft beat humans on a Stanford University reading comprehension test. Alibaba took the honor as the creator of the first program to ever beat a human in a reading comprehension test, scoring 82.44 percent and narrowly edging past the human's 82.304 percent. A different program built by Microsoft scored higher than Alibaba's at 82.605 percent. Microsoft's took the same test as Alibaba's but was finalized a day later, according to Bloomberg. The test known as Stanford Question Answering Dataset, or SQuAD for short, asks the contestants – human and robot – to provide exact answers to more than 100,000 questions drawn from more than 500 Wikipedia articles.