Co-founder and CEO Nigel Toon laughs at that interview opener -- perhaps because he sold his previous company to the chipmaker back in 2011. "I'm sure Nvidia will be successful as well," he ventures. "They're already being very successful in this market… And being a viable competitor and standing alongside them, I think that would be a worthy aim for ourselves." Toon also flags what he couches an "interesting absence" in the competitive landscape vis-a-vis other major players "that you'd expect to be there" -- e.g. A recent report by analyst Gartner suggests AI technologies will be in almost every software product by 2020.

I went to school in Cambridge University in England, then went to Stanford to do my master's around 2000. I met up with Sergey Brin around then when Google was a tiny company and he invited me to join Google. So I started working part-time for Google. It was a fantastic time at the company--200 people, one building, and bright, idealistic, change-the-world kind of people. Naturally, when I finished my master's I joined full-time.