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AI Beats Humans at Reading Comprehension (bloomberg.com)
In what is being called a landmark moment for natural language processing, Alibaba and Microsoft have developed AIs that can outperform humans on a reading and comprehension test. From a report: Alibaba Group put its deep neural network model through its paces last week, asking the AI to provide exact answers to more than 100,000 questions comprising a quiz that's considered one of the world's most authoritative machine-reading gauges. The model developed by Alibaba's Institute of Data Science of Technologies scored 82.44, edging past the 82.304 that rival humans achieved. Alibaba said it's the first time a machine has out-done a real person in such a contest. Microsoft achieved a similar feat, scoring 82.650 on the same test, but those results were finalized a day after Alibaba's, the company said.
Based upon the knee-jerk quality of many comments posted on /. this should not be a surprise to anyone.
“Mary saw a bicycle in the store window. She wanted it.”
Does Mary want the bike, the store, or the window?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
It's okay in a lot of areas, it's just that no one really gives a shit about the inner city school districts and so they've gone to absolute shit. If you remove that from the equation, the U.S. as a whole is quite comparable to other western democracies. The U.S. has seems more content to let this problem fester and to deal with the consequences rather than tackle it head on so the problem just goes from bad to worse in a lot of ways.
On a side note, if there weren't so many useless (not as in they suck at their jobs, just useless in that their jobs don't improve educational outcomes in any measurable way) administrators soaking up money, we could pay teachers a hell of a lot more. The U.S. spends more on education as a percentage of GDP than other countries that do as well or better than us, and over time our spending on education as a percentage of GDP has increased. Even though you hear about cutbacks all the time (who pays attention when funding is increased?) the trend has been moving upward over time. So it's not strictly a money problem.
Here's a good report (PDF warning) that has looked into how public education has changed in the U.S. over time. The increase in administrative staff has done nothing to improve outcomes and removing the excess would allow for an additional ~$11,000 in yearly salary for every teacher.