How Artificial Intelligence Startups Struck Gold

Whenever a hot new field starts to take off, you'll inevitably hear sighs of regret by the many who wish they'd gotten into it when they had the chance. The billion-dollar question is, why didn't they? The answer is, they chose not to. That's what separates successful people from the pack: the choices they make. Web service leaders Amazon, Google and Microsoft are scooping up talent and buying startups left and right in a race for facial and speech recognition technology used in cloud-based searches and other red-hot machine learning applications.