Microsoft has taken "a genuine step towards medical superintelligence," says Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of the company's artificial intelligence arm. The tech giant says its powerful new AI tool can diagnose disease four times more accurately and at significantly less cost than a panel of human physicians. The experiment tested whether the tool could correctly diagnose a patient with an ailment, mimicking work typically done by a human doctor. The Microsoft team used 304 case studies sourced from the New England Journal of Medicine to devise a test called the Sequential Diagnosis Benchmark (SDBench). A language model broke down each case into a step-by-step process that a doctor would perform in order to reach a diagnosis.

Microsoft said on Friday that it would sell the military and intelligence agencies whatever advanced technologies they needed "to build a strong defense," just months after Google told the Pentagon it would refuse to provide artificial intelligence products that could build more accurate drones or compete with China for next-generation weapons. The announcement -- made quietly in a small, town-hall-style meeting with the software giant's leadership and employees on Thursday, then published on a blog on Friday afternoon -- starkly illustrated the radically different paths these leading American technology companies are taking as they struggle with their role in creating a new generation of cyberweapons to help, and perhaps someday replace, American warriors. But the divergent paths also underscore concerns inside the American defense and intelligence establishments about how the United States will take on a rising China. In the past two years, the Chinese government has set goals for dominance in the next decade in artificial intelligence, quantum computing and other technologies that it believes will allow its military and intelligence agencies to surpass those of the United States. Pentagon officials have questioned how committed domestic technology companies are to keeping the country on the leading edge, the way Raytheon, Boeing, IBM and McDonnell Douglas did during the Cold War.

Despite its potentially widespread applications, creating a speech recognition software capable of cutting through the nuances and variations in the spoken word has been a task fraught with patchy success, at best. The aim many companies have striven toward is to create a software that can recognize the words in a conversation as well as a human would -- a key requisite for a truly immersive artificial intelligence experience. In a major breakthrough in this endeavor, Microsoft announced Tuesday that it had created a technology that enabled speech recognition systems to transcribe a conversation with the same error rate as their human counterparts. "We've reached human parity," Xuedong Huang, Microsoft's chief speech scientist, said in a statement. "This is an historic achievement."