Artificial intelligence can read! Tech firms race to smarten up thinking machines

FILE - In this Thursday, Jan. 13, 2011, file photo, "Jeopardy!" Seven years after Watson beat two human quizmasters on a Jeopardy! Ever since, the tech industry has been training its machines even harder to make them better at amassing knowledge and answering questions. And it's worked, at least up to a point. Just don't expect artificial intelligence to spit out a literary analysis of Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace" any time soon. Research teams at Microsoft and Chinese tech company Alibaba reached what they described as a milestone earlier this month when their AI systems outperformed the estimated human score on a reading comprehension test.