AI-powered robots from Alibaba and Microsoft beat humans in Stanford University comprehension test

tech2 News Staff Jan 16, 2018 10:08 AM IST

Artificially intelligence robots from Chinese firm Alibaba and US tech giant Microsoft have beaten humans in the Stanford University reading comprehension test.

Jack Ma, Founder, Alibaba

In a report by CNN, the Chinese firm Alibaba said, “This is the first time that a machine has outperformed humans on such a test.”

The comprehension test included passage reading from Wikipedia articles by the robots. This was followed by a question and answer round where the robots and humans competed against each other.

The robots both from Alibaba and Microsoft won by a narrow margin. The one from Alibaba scored 82.44, while Microsoft robot scored 82.650. Meanwhile, the human scored 82.34. Both Alibaba and Microsoft defeated the human, even though by a very narrow margin.

Designed by artificial intelligence experts in Stanford, the robot from Alibaba was the first to beat the score.

While both the robots are set to have covered a milestone, it poses a threat to the humans it competes against. It almost inches one step further in the direction of Technological Singularity, which is the hypothesis which states that artificial machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence.

When asked about the repercussions of such advancements, Luo Si the chief scientist of natural language processing at Alibaba’s AI research group said that this might lead to a loss of jobs.

A strong start to 2018 with the first model (SLQA+) to exceed human-level performance on @stanfordnlp SQuAD's EM metric! Next challenge: the F1 metric, where humans still lead by ~2.5 points!https://t.co/Uq10Dm2Ss5

— Pranav Rajpurkar (@pranavrajpurkar) 11 January 2018

The jobs that Alibaba’s AI can take over are “museum tutorials and online responses to medical queries from patients,” he said.

Alibaba is said to have already put their robots to work in areas such as customer service.

Last year, China had said that it aims to become the world leader in artificial intelligence by 2025.