Marc is yet another techie who has made a successful transition to being an entrepreneur. In this interview, he discusses his journey, as well as a lot of the nuances of positioning his venture, Starmind, for success. Sramana Mitra: Let's start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Starmind. Marc Vontobel: I'm the Co-Founder and CEO of Starmind. I have a background in Computer Science specializing in AI. That's also the origin of Starmind. I met my co-founder at the artificial intelligence laboratory in Zurich. We were supposed to work on humanoid robots, and we were totally lost. The initial idea of Starmind came up to build an eBay for knowledge. Instead of learning all the different disciplines ourselves, we envisioned having a platform where we can ask any question and put a price tag on it. That's how Starmind started. The problem was it was a one-sided market. No one really wanted to pay a colleague for their knowledge. It took us some time to

One of the most straightforward ways to think about artificial intelligence is to define it as a machine's ability to understand or perform in a way that would normally need human intelligence. A lot of what we see called AI in software and cloud services is closer to automation. Automation is based on input and response: an input of X equals a response of Y. With the growing complexity of algorithms, the calculations undertaken to decide how to respond to a given input can be extremely complicated and so automated responses created in this way can give the impression of intelligence. But in reality they are predetermined.