It's official, AI is now better at reading comprehension than humans are

Artificial intelligence (AI) from Alibaba and Microsoft beat the human score in a Stanford reading comprehension test, the companies announced separately on Monday. The Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD) uses a set of questions and answers about Wikipedia articles, according to our sister site CNET. Microsoft scored 82.65 and Alibaba's score was 82.44, both good for first place, but barely beat the human score of 82.304. The results, however slim the margin, suggest AI may be able to match or outperform humans in certain tasks. As the field develops, this margin will most likely increase, potentially allowing AI to be smart enough to take over certain jobs--possibly even high-level ones--and let humans focus on others.