PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — Seven years ago, a computer beat two human quizmasters on a "Jeopardy" challenge. Ever since, the tech industry has been training its machines to make them even better at amassing knowledge and answering questions.

And it's worked, at least up to a point. Just don't expect artificial intelligence to spit out a literary analysis of Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace" any time soon.

Research teams at Microsoft and Chinese tech company Alibaba reached what they described as a milestone earlier this month when their AI systems outperformed the estimated human score on a reading c...