Microsoft says its AI can describe images ‘as well as people do’
In 2016, Google said its artificial intelligence could caption images almost as well as humans, with 94 percent accuracy. Now Microsoft says it’s gone even further: Its researchers have built an AI system that’s even more accurate than humans — so much so that it now sits at the top of the leaderboard for the nocaps image captioning benchmark.
It’s not unusual to see companies tout their AI research innovations, but it’s far rarer for those discoveries to be quickly deployed to shipping products. Xuedong Huang, CTO of Azure AI cognitive services, pushed to integrate it into Azure quickly because of the potential benefits for users.
But while beating a benchmark is significant, the real test for Microsoft’s new model will be how it functions in the real world. According to Boyd, Seeing AI developer Saqib Shaik, who also pushes for greater accessibility at Microsoft as a blind person himself, describes it as a dramatic improvement over their previous offering.
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