The code has been copied to your clipboard. Machines equipped with artificial intelligence (AI) have performed better than human beings in a high-level test of reading comprehension. Two natural language processing tools received higher test scores than humans in recent exams. One of the tools is a product of the American software maker Microsoft. The other was created by the Chinese online seller Alibaba Group.

Fears that machines programmed with artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities will first take human jobs and then take over the world may not be completely unfounded. A survey conducted by the University of Oxford and Yale University polled 352 AI experts and looked at what the leading minds in machine learning think the timing will be for a variety of AI capabilities, as well as superiority over humans in occupations, superiority in all tasks and potential social impact. The results might be somewhat concerning, depending on your feelings toward our future robot overlords. The study found that in the next 10 years, AI will outperform humans in activities such as language translation (by 2024) and truck driving (by 2027). Beyond that, robots will soon be writing best-selling books (by 2049) and performing surgery (by 2053).

Imagine your smartphone being able to negotiate the best price of a new car for you -- that's one of the potential implications of artificial intelligence beating humans in poker for the first time, experts say. Libratus, an AI built by Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), racked up over $US1.7 million ($2.2 million) worth of chips against four of the top professional poker players in the world in a 20-day marathon poker tournament that ended in Philadelphia on Tuesday.. While machines have beaten humans over the last two decade in chess, checkers, and most recently in the ancient game of Go, Libratus' victory is significant because poker is an imperfect information game -- similar to the real world where not all problems are laid out. The difficulty in figuring out human behaviour is one of the main reasons why poker was considered immune to machines. "The best AI's ability to do strategic reasoning with imperfect information has now surpassed that of the best humans," said Tuomas Sandholm, professor of computer science at CMU who created Libratus with a PhD student Noam Brown.