Microsoft's new A.I. can read and comprehend documents as accurately as humans

Big news from Microsoft regarding A.I. and Machine Learning. A team at Microsoft Research Asia reached the human parity milestone using the Stanford Question Answering Dataset, known among researchers as SQuAD. It’s a machine reading comprehension dataset that is made up of questions about a set of Wikipedia articles.

According to the SQuAD leaderboard, on Jan. 3, Microsoft submitted a model that reached the score of 82.650 on the exact match portion. The human performance on the same set of questions and answers is 82.304. On Jan. 5, researchers with the Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba submitted a score of 82.440, also about the same as a human.

The two companies are currently tied for first place on the SQuAD “leaderboard,” which lists the results of research organizations’ efforts. 

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Intel Invests $1 Billion in the AI Ecosystem

Intel sees Artificial Intelligence as one of the tentpoles of its future. The company is investing in that future with a US $1 billion aimed to develop product innovation.

"AI will make the impossible possible: advancing research on cancer, Parkinson’s disease and brain disorders; helping to find missing children; and furthering scientific efforts in climate change, space exploration and oceanic research," explained Brian Krzanich, chief executive officer of Intel.

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Duolingo introduces AI-powered chatbots

Free language-learning platform Duolingo is helping language learners practice their new skills with the use of chatbots. The service gets three language “tutors” in the iOS app that you can text back and forth for practice. There’s Renèe the Driver, Chef Roberto, and Officer Ada to help you practice French, Spanish, and German. Duolingo promises to add more languages in the future but that’ll depend on demand. And since these chatbots are powered by artificial intelligence, the more you use them, the smarter they get. Chatbots have been gaining popularity in the recent months but are far from being polished products yet. It’s good to see them being used in more and more services to hopefully stabilize and improve them.

Honda furthers AI tech development in its cars with SoftBank partnership

Artificial intelligence is at the heart of a new partnership between Honda and internet company SoftBank. The idea is that the AI in vehicles will be able to read and react to the emotions of the drivers as intelligently as it can. “"Imagine if robots, with their super intelligence, devoted themselves to humans,” SoftBank Group Corp.’s Masayoshi Son said during an event in Tokyo announcing the partnership. “And imagine that cars themselves became supercomputers or robots one day. Honda will be the first to adopt this technology.” The team suggests that Honda cars might interact with drivers using the technology used in SoftBank’s Pepper robot. And maybe Pepper could even meet Honda’s own Asimo (Advanced Step in Innovative Mobility) robot.

Honda’s team will be working with SoftBank’s Cocoro SB unit on AI research for cars. This team from SoftBank is currently studying cloud-based AI on their own.  SoftBank recently acquired chipmaker ARM, which is seen as an essential move needed for this partnership to work. Honda previously announced they were establishing a research facility this September dedicated to AI technology.

Source: Reuters | Via: SlashGear