Semantic Scholar is an academic search engine from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. It too uses AI to search the academic literature and it is impressively fast. Still in beta, it's interface is less elegant, more "academic utilitarian" than the sleek Iris. And it also throws up some oddities. A search for the landmark paper "A safe operating space for humanity", which appeared in Nature (along with Science, one of the two leading academic journals) in 2009, does not show up on the first page, nor does the follow up paper, which appeared in Science in 2015.

In 2011, Artificial Intelligence (AI) came of age when IBM's Watson computer beat two human contestants to win Jeopardy. These were not any two contestants. Ken Jennings had won 74 times consecutively and Brad Rutter had pocketed the biggest pot in history -- 3.25 million. In the battle between men and machine, Watson's win was historic. Jennings was sanguine about losing: "I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords."