Microsoft, Alibaba AI programmes beat humans in Stanford reading test

First, it was chess. Then it was Go. Now it’s basic reading comprehension.

The robots are coming.

Two artificial intelligence (AI) programmes created by Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba and Microsoft beat humans on a Stanford University reading comprehension test.

Alibaba took the honour as the creator of the first programmes to ever beat a human in a reading comprehension test, scoring 82.44 per cent and narrowly edging past the human’s 82.304 per cent.

A different program built by Microsoft scored higher than Alibaba’s at 82.605 per cent. 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 answer provide exact answers to more than 100,000 questions drawn from more than 500 Wikipedia articles. The test is designed to see if AI can process large amounts of information before fully comprehending it and offering precise answers.

Some of the Wikipedia articles where questions were drawn from covered a wide range, from Super Bowl 50 (“Where did Super Bowl 50 take place?” Answer: Santa Clara, California) to “Doctor Who” (“What planet is Doctor Who from?” Answer: Gallifrey.).

“These kinds of tests are certainly useful benchmarks for how far along the AI journey we may be,” Microsoft spokesman Andrew Pickup told CNN. “However, the real benefit of AI is when it is used in harmony with humans.”

Major technology companies in the United States and China have invested billions of dollars in AI to gain a foothold in what may be the next technological frontier. The Chinese government has outlined a plan to create a $150 billion AI industry by 2030 in partnership with private companies such as Alibaba and Tencent.

Microsoft in December announced its “AI on Earth” project to help the planet become more environmentally sustainable using its in-house AI infrastructure. The company will invest $50 million for the next five years, according to Microsoft CEO Brad Smith.

With AI’s comprehension skills now arguably better than a human being, Alibaba’s chief data scientist said, the breakthrough will be applied to helping human customers.

“The technology underneath can be gradually applied to numerous applications such as customer service, museum tutorials and online responses to medical inquiries from patients, decreasing the need for human input in an unprecedented way,” Luo Si, chief scientist for natural language processing at Alibaba’s Institute of Data Science of Technologies, told Bloomberg.