AI can read! Tech firms race to smarten up thinking machines

Ever since, the tech industry has been training its machines to make them even 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. It was the latest demonstration of rapid advances that have improved search engines and voice assistants and that are finding broader applications in health care and other fields. The answers they got wrong -- and the test itself -- also highlight the limitations of computer intelligence and the difficulty of comparing it directly to human intelligence.