Microsoft AI, Alibaba AI Outscore Humans in Reading Comprehension

AI has defeated humans in chess and poker, and now it has come to dominate another field: reading comprehension.

The AI developed by Microsoft and Alibaba beat humans in a recent reading test. The data came from Stanford University. Each AI analyzed more than 500 articles on Wikipedia and matched questions and answers. In total, Standford prepared more than 100,000 pairs of data sets for testing.

One sample question was “when did Genghis Khan die?” The answer was AD 1227.

“Machines used to be unable to surpass humans in this test. This was the first time,” Alibaba said in a statement.

The Microsoft program scored 82.6 points and Alibaba scored 82.4 points, both surpassing the average human score of 82.3. Other AI programs have were also tested and confirmed to surpass human scores, such as the AI developed by the Allen AI Institute, Tencent, Salesforce and others.

This article originally appeared in Sina Technology and was translated by Pandaily.