Companies

DARPA is the research agency of the United States Department of Defense, created in 1958 in response to Sputnik. It states its mission as creating and preventing technological surprise, and its Grand Challenges brought autonomous vehicle work to a wider community.

Research historyRoboticsScience

A private Ivy League college in Hanover, New Hampshire, founded by royal charter in 1769. Its 1956 summer research project, proposed by John McCarthy, is credited with launching artificial intelligence as a field.

Research historySymbolic AIEducation

Databricks is a San Francisco software company founded in 2013 by seven people behind Apache Spark, which grew out of the University of California, Berkeley AMPLab project [1][2]. Its valuation rose from $38 billion in 2021 to $188 billion in 2026 [4][11].

Large language modelsEnterpriseData & datasets

DeepSeek is a Chinese AI company founded in Hangzhou in July 2023 as a spin-off of the AGI research lab of High-Flyer, a hedge fund. It releases its main models with open weights.

Large language modelsOpen sourceChina

The Department of Machine Intelligence and Perception at the University of Edinburgh, created in October 1966 out of Donald Michie's Experimental Programming Unit, was an early British institutional home for artificial intelligence and a forerunner of the university's School of Informatics.

Research historyRoboticsSymbolic AI

DNNresearch Inc. was a University of Toronto start-up founded in 2012 by Geoffrey Hinton and two of his graduate students; Google bought it for its deep neural network research.

Research historyEnterpriseDeep learning

Dragon Systems was a speech recognition company in Newton, Massachusetts, founded in 1982 by James K. Baker and Janet M. Baker. It made DragonDictate and NaturallySpeaking; its product line later passed to Nuance.

Research historyEnterpriseProduct history

EleutherAI is a grassroots AI research collective that began as a Discord server in July 2020. It released The Pile and the open GPT-style models GPT-Neo, GPT-J and GPT-NeoX-20B, and in 2023 it became a nonprofit research institute.

Large language modelsResearch historyOpen source

EPFL, the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, is a technical university founded in 1853 and renamed in 1969; it organizes its work around three missions: teaching, research and innovation.

Research historyScienceEurope

Epoch AI is a data-first research nonprofit studying the future of artificial intelligence, known for tracking AI training-compute trends, hosting databases on hardware and compute, and running independent model evaluations and its FrontierMath benchmark.

Research historyData & datasetsScience

The European AI Office is a body inside the European Commission that supports implementation of the EU AI Act and enforces the rules for general-purpose AI models. It was established in February 2024.

Foundation modelsSafety & governanceEurope

The European Commission is the executive body of the European Union: it proposes laws and policies, monitors how they are applied, manages the EU budget and represents the EU externally.

EnterpriseSafety & governanceEurope

A public benefit AI company that introduced itself alongside its ESM3 model in June 2024 and whose team joined Biohub in November 2025.

Research historyFoundation modelsScience

An AI drug-discovery company with sites in London and Oxford that focused on computational molecule design; in November 2024 it became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Recursion, with a combined pipeline of more than 10 clinical and preclinical programmes.

EnterpriseScienceBiomedicine

The FCC is the US agency that administers the Communications Act of 1934. In 2024 it confirmed that restrictions on artificial or prerecorded voices already cover AI-generated voices, and proposed a US$6 million robocall penalty.

Consumer appsSafety & governanceData & datasets

Figure AI is a Sunnyvale, California company building general-purpose humanoid robots for industrial work, backed by a large investor group and partnered with BMW Manufacturing.

EnterpriseProduct historyRobotics

Fourier is a Shanghai robotics company founded in 2015 by Gu Jie. It began with rehabilitation robots and exoskeletons, then released the GR-1, GR-2 and GR-3 full-size humanoid robots in 2023, 2024 and 2025.

ChinaRoboticsHumanoid robots

Galbot is a robotics company founded in 2023 that builds general-purpose robots around an embodied foundation model, with its AstraBrain model family, a large-scale data infrastructure and deployed robots in several industries.

ChinaRoboticsHumanoid robots

General Motors acquired the self-driving startup Cruise Automation in 2016, then stopped funding its robotaxi work in December 2024 and refocused on hands-free driver assistance such as Super Cruise.

EnterpriseConsumer appsRobotics

GitHub is a code hosting and collaboration platform used by more than 225 million developers, acquired by Microsoft in 2018 and the birthplace of the GitHub Copilot coding assistant.

Product historyDeveloper toolsCode