It was 1997 when the Deep Blue computer beat the world chess champion, Garry Kasparov. It was the first machine over human victory while playing the mother of all strategic games. Well, even though the Deep Blue computer was created specifically to play chess versus human, it took just a few years more for standard desktop computers to dominate our brains on the chess board. Now there are smartphone chess apps have been able to defeat exceptionally good players.
This was the first time when the machine ‘outminded’ humans. By declaring that AI software scored a better result than humans in a large-scale reading and comprehension test, it seems we are witnessing the second breakthrough.
Machine learning model developed by China`s biggest e-commerce company Ali Baba scored 82.44 points at a test with more than 100 000 questions, compared with 82.30 by humans. It is widely known that machines are far away from the sophisticated understanding of a natural language. It seems this is now over.
What this actually means? Does it show that the computer all of a sudden became more intelligent than humans did? Well, not exactly!
Modern AI & machine learning algorithms improve their abilities so there are machines capable to give an explanation on complicated questions like what is causing the rain. Yet they are often confused with questions, which are not predefined, or with open questions requiring answer different from Yes or No. Ali Xiaomi, Alibaba scientist, said that if the expressions are too vague, their bot may not work properly. This way we reached the point where a computer understands more than we do but it is still unable to identify let alone answer any nuances or else.
So how we can utilize such complex of abilities? IoT personal assistants like Alexa and Echo are already a thing and it is a continuous trend. They can be helpful for completing simple tasks saving human efforts. Machines with higher potential of understanding mean they can perform well at tasks like customer service and support. Legal research is another field for AI application and it is going to eliminate the necessity of human workforce.
It seems that it is a matter of time to see support centers ran almost entirely by bots and legal partnerships without trainees and juniors.
