Two artificial intelligence programs created by Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba and Microsoft beat humans on a Stanford University reading comprehension test. Alibaba took the honor as the creator of the first program to ever beat a human in a reading comprehension test, scoring 82.44 percent and narrowly edging past the human's 82.304 percent. A different program built by Microsoft scored higher than Alibaba's at 82.605 percent. Microsoft's took the same test as Alibaba's but was finalized a day later, according to Bloomberg. The test known as Stanford Question Answering Dataset, or SQuAD for short, asks the contestants – human and robot – to provide exact answers to more than 100,000 questions drawn from more than 500 Wikipedia articles.

In less than 20 years, Alibaba has become one of the top ten largest companies in the world, primarily due to its success as an online retailer. The internet has changed the way that we shop, and as such the company is pumping money into research projects that will help ensure that it can keep up with the next game-changing advance in e-commerce.

Two artificial intelligence programs created by Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba and Microsoft beat humans on a Stanford University reading comprehension test, Alibaba said Monday.

Google's AI was the first to beat a Go champion a couple of years back (and it continues to teach itself how to play other games, too). Now Bloomberg reports that Alibaba and Microsoft have both developed AI that scores better than humans on a Stanford University reading test. The Chinese online commerce company's deep neural network was the first to score higher than a human on the reading test. The 100,000-question quiz is considered to be the most authoritative measures of machine reading, according to Bloomberg. The highest humans have score on the measure is 82.304.