Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen founded The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in 2014 to achieve scientific breakthroughs by building AI systems with reasoning, learning, and reading capabilities. Over the years, the private research institute and startup incubator has pushed the frontiers of AI and machine learning. We have listed their major innovations here. Built on PyTorch, AllenNLP is an open source model. The deep learning library supports the management of experiments and the evaluation after development.

Last week, researchers at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence demonstrated in a new paper that an AI they'd designed could ace an eighth-grade multiple-choice science test with more than 90 percent correct answers -- and do quite well on a 12th-grade science test, too, with more than 80 percent correct answers. The system, called Aristo, took the New York Regents Science Exam (a standardized test for students across New York State), with a few limitations: it didn't have to solve the problems that involved looking at diagrams. Nonetheless, the researchers tested the program on different versions of the test as well as on tests from different years and found that its performance was pretty consistent: It's an A student. Aristo demonstrates how quickly AI is advancing. As recently as 2016, the paper's authors note, no one in the field could manage to score as well as 60 percent on a similar eighth-grade science exam.

In case you're wondering, I am now a slave to a chemical clock. Last night, for no special reason, the Evil Dex kept me up until 4:30 and then didn't wake me up until 9:30. That's pretty inconvenient, though it is five hours of sleep, which isn't too bad. I used the time last night to read one of Elizabeth Warren's books since it's increasingly looking like she'll be the 46th president of the United States. For you doubters, and I know you're out there, here are some sample question of the kind that Aristo had to answer: Now, yes, I scored 100 percent on this just like you did.

Is actual knowledge needed to beat this test? The stories were supposed to capture a new step forward in artificial intelligence. A "Breakthrough for A.I. Technology: Passing an 8th-Grade Science Test," said the New York Times. "AI Aristo takes science test, emerges multiple-choice superstar," said TechXPlore. Both stories were talking about Aristo (indicating a child version of Aristotle), a project of Paul Allen's Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, where the headline read, "How to tutor AI from an'F' to an'A.'"

AI has achieved remarkable mastery over games such as Chess, Go, and Poker, and even Jeopardy, but the rich variety of standardized exams has remained a landmark challenge. Even in 2016, the best AI system achieved merely 59.3% on an 8th Grade science exam challenge. This paper reports unprecedented success on the Grade 8 New York Regents Science Exam, where for the first time a system scores more than 90% on the exam's non-diagram, multiple choice (NDMC) questions. In addition, our Aristo system, building upon the success of recent language models, exceeded 83% on the corresponding Grade 12 Science Exam NDMC questions. The results, on unseen test questions, are robust across different test years and different variations of this kind of test. They demonstrate that modern NLP methods can result in mastery on this task. While not a full solution to general question-answering (the questions are multiple choice, and the domain is restricted to 8th Grade science), it represents a significant milestone for the field.

Artificial intelligence researchers have long dreamed of building a computer as knowledgeable and communicative as the one in Star Trek, which could interact with humans in natural (i.e., human) language. Last week, we seemed to boldly go toward that ideal. The New York Times reported that a team at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) had achieved "an artificial-intelligence milestone." AI2's program, Aristo, not only passed but also excelled on a standardized eighth-grade science test. The machine, the Times heralded, "is ready for high school science. Melanie Mitchell is professor of computer science at Portland State University and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Her book Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans will be published in October by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Aristo isn't the first AI system to shine on a test designed to gauge human knowledge and reasoning abilities. In 2015 one system matched a 4-year-old's performance on an ...

This article is part of Demystifying AI, a series of posts that (try to) disambiguate the jargon and myths surrounding AI. Last week, the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) introduced Aristo, an artificial intelligence model that scored above 90 percent on an 8th grade science test and 80 percent on a 12th-grade exam. Passing a science test might sound mundane, if you're not familiar with how deep learning algorithms, the current bleeding edge of AI, work. After all, AI is already performing tasks such as diagnosing cancer, detecting fraud and playing complicated games, which are much more complicated than answering simple science questions about the moon and squirrel populations. But despite its fascinating achievements, deep learning struggles when it comes to tackling problems that require reasoning and commonsense.

Aristo has passed an American eighth grade science test. If you are told Aristo is an earnest kid who loves to read all he can about Faraday and plays the drums you will say so what, big deal. Aristo, though, is an artificial intelligence program and scientists would like the world to know this is a big deal, as "a benchmark in AI development," as Melissa Locker called it in Fast Company. We mean, just think about it. Cade Metz, in The New York Times, has thought about it.

Could you score an'A' on an eighth-grade science test? If so, you're in the same league as Aristo, an artificial intelligence system whose remarkable language and logic skills highlight recent progress in the A.I. industry. For context: Four years ago, some 700 computer scientists competed for $80,000 to develop an A.I. that could merely pass an eighth-grade science test. None scored higher than 60 percent. But now, thanks to improved "language models" driven by neural networks, systems like Aristo are becoming much better at predicting language and understanding how to apply it to solve logic-based tasks. Aristo, as The New York Times notes, is built on a neural-network technology called Bert, developed by Google.

An artificial intelligence system developed by the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence successfully passed an eighth-grade multiple-choice science test, correctly answering over 90% of the questions. The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence introduced an artificial intelligence (AI) system that successfully passed an eighth-grade multiple-choice science test, correctly answering over 90% of the questions, as well as scoring more than 80% on a 12th-grade test. The Aristo system's milestone suggests understanding the language and logic that high school students are expected to possess is no longer outside AI's capabilities. Aristo took standard exams written for students in New York schools, with questions including pictures and diagrams removed; some questions required simple information retrieval, while others required logical thinking. Aristo was built atop Google's Bert, a language-model system that learned via guessing missing words in sentences.