China’s biggest online commerce Alibaba, has developed an Artificial Intelligence (AI) model that uses natural language processing to mimic human comprehension of words and sentences.
Developing its deep neural network model at a faster rate then ever before, Alibaba's AI scored better than humans in a Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD), a large-scale reading comprehension test with more than 100,000 questions, according to a release by Alibaba’s Institute of Data Science and Technologies (iDST).
In the quiz, companies were subjected to show their AI some queries from the SQuAD that is considered as one of the world’s most authoritative machine-reading gauges.
Based on more than 500 Wikipedia articles, SQuAD's questions are designed to test whether machine-learning models can process large amounts of information before supplying precise answers to queries.
The computers' answers were then compared against average human responses to be ranked.
The machine-learning model from Alibaba scored 82.440 on the test, compared with 82.304 by humans.
With this achievement, the Chinese e-commerce titan has joined the likes of Tencent Holdings Ltd. and Baidu Inc. in a race to develop AI that can enhance social feeds, target ads and services or even aid in autonomous driving and others.
Beijing has endorsed the technology in a national-level plan that calls for the country to become the industry leader in the close future.
According to Luo Si, iDST's chief scientist for Natural Language Processing:
"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."
Alibaba said that the success is its first time, and is the milestone for the company to beat a real person in such contest.
On that same test, Microsoft achieved a similar feat, scoring a bit higher at 82.650.
While Microsoft and Alibaba came up as the two on top, the slim margin between them was concluded a tie. This marks the AI arms race being waged by the U.S. and China.
A number of top international universities and global technology companies, including Google, Facebook, IBM, to Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford University and the Allen Research Institute, have all used SQuAD's test to determine whether their machine learning models can answer the questions in the data set.
"These kinds of tests are certainly useful benchmarks for how far along the AI journey we may be," said Andrew Pickup, a spokesman for Microsoft. "However, the real benefit of AI is when it is used in harmony with humans."