AI just got a big boost in its ability to understand the news

Soon you could be chatting with your computer about the morning news. An AI has learned to read and answer questions about a news article with unprecedented accuracy. Creating AI systems that can learn in the background from humanity's existing stores of information is one of the big goals of computer science. "Computers don't have the kind of general knowledge and common sense of how the world works [from reading] about things in novels or watch[ing] sitcoms," says Chris Manning at Stanford University. To get a step closer to this, last year, Google's DeepMind team used articles from the Daily Mail website and CNN to help train an algorithm to read and understand a short story.