Chris Nicholson traveled a meandering path from Big Sky Country to CEO of start-up Skymind

Chris Nicholson, 42, is chief executive of Skymind, an artificial intelligence company in San Francisco that's vying with dozens of other start-ups to emerge as a major player in the nascent AI economy. Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and other tech giants now dominate "deep learning" AI, powering such things as voice-activated personal assistants, image recognition and driverless cars. Skymind has built open-source programs and assembled a team of experts to help organizations smaller than Google or Apple build their own deep-learning programs. Thousands of start-up wannabees would love to have Skymind's funding -- $6.3 million from venture capitalist hotshots such as Ray Lane's GreatPoint Ventures and China's Tencent Holdings Ltd. "Montana is a beautiful place, with a lot of wonderful people," the Montana native said. "But if there's one adjective you'd use to describe it, it's remote. For anybody born curious in Montana, the first task is'how to expose myself to the world.'"