At a number of companies, employees compete on leaderboards to show how much A.I. they’re using. They’re racking up big bills along the way.

An exclusive conversation with OpenAI’s chief scientist, Jakub Pachocki, about his firm's new grand challenge and the future of AI.

But Kozmo.com, just one of many examples, shows how likely the first mover in a sector is to founder or fail or fall out of favor: Friendster and Myspace were first in social networking, but Facebook ...