Machines equipped with artificial intelligence (AI) have performed better than human beings in a high-level test of reading comprehension. Two natural language processing tools received higher test scores than humans in recent exams. One of the tools is a product of the American software maker Microsoft. The other was created by the Chinese online seller Alibaba Group. Alibaba reported its success earlier this month. The company said that a deep-learning model developed by its Institute of Data Science of Technologies was the first to beat a human score in the reading comprehension test. The test is called the Stanford Question Answering Dataset. It was developed by researchers at Stanford University in California.