Companies

01.AI is a Beijing-based artificial intelligence company founded in 2023 by Kai-Fu Lee. It builds open and closed large language models, including the Yi series, and the Wanzhi enterprise platform.

Large language modelsOpen sourceChina

Chinese humanoid robotics company founded in February 2023 by Peng Zhihui, a former Huawei "genius youth"; it builds complete robots and their joint modules, and aims to push hardware costs below 200,000 yuan.

ChinaEnterpriseRobotics

Alibaba Cloud is the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group and the developer of the Qwen (Tongyi Qianwen) large language model family, which is released as both open weights and proprietary models.

Large language modelsOpen sourceChina

Alibaba Group is a technology company founded in 1999 that describes itself as focused on AI + Cloud and commerce; its Qwen models and data centre build-out are central to that positioning.

ChinaEnterpriseConsumer apps

Ant Group is the company whose InclusionAI team released the open-weight Ling (Bailing) family of mixture-of-experts language models in 2025, including Ling-Lite and Ling-Plus, trained without premium GPUs and published under the MIT licence.

Large language modelsOpen sourceChina

Baichuan Intelligence (百川智能) is a Beijing AI company founded in April 2023 by Wang Xiaochuan. It released open-source language models from 2023 and later focused on applying AI to healthcare.

Large language modelsOpen sourceChina

Baidu is a Beijing-based Chinese internet company founded in 2000. It runs China's dominant search engine and develops the ERNIE model family and the ERNIE Bot chatbot.

Large language modelsChinaConsumer apps

Baidu Research is the research arm of Baidu, built around the Institute of Deep Learning founded in 2013, with laboratories in Beijing and Silicon Valley; in 2014 Andrew Ng became chief scientist in charge of the whole organisation.

Research historyChinaEnterprise

BIGAI is a non-profit AI research institute in Beijing, led by Zhu Songchun, that works with Peking and Tsinghua universities toward a unified theory of general intelligence and general intelligent agents.

Research historyChinaEducation

Bell Labs was the research arm of the Bell System, where the transistor, Unix and the C language were created. Yann LeCun's convolutional networks for handwritten digits were developed there, which made it an early home of neural-network research.

Research historyDeep learningHardware & compute

Chinese chip designer founded in 2019 that builds general-purpose GPU (GPGPU) chips and intelligent computing solutions on its self-developed BILI series hardware and BIRENSUPA software, for AI training and inference from cloud to edge.

ChinaEnterpriseDeep learning

ByteDance is a Chinese internet company founded in 2012, whose AI work includes the Doubao chatbot, the TRAE coding tool, the Seed model team and the Volcano Engine cloud platform.[^1]

Large language modelsChinaConsumer apps

A Chinese AI chip company founded in 2016 and listed on the STAR Market in 2020. It designs cloud, edge and endpoint chips, and in 2025 it turned profitable as revenue rose sharply.

ChinaEnterpriseDeep learning

Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh has one of the earliest US computer science departments. Its researchers built the Logic Theorist, Sphinx speech recognition and the Deep Blue lineage, and won the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge.

Research historyDeep learningRobotics

CloudWalk Technology is a Chinese AI company built on academic face recognition research. Founded in April 2015, it was the last of the four Chinese computer vision firms known as the "CV four little dragons" to be established.

Research historyChinaEnterprise

CVPR is the annual Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, first held in 1983 and usually held in June in North America. It is known for selective, double-blind review and open-access papers.

Research historyDeep learningComputer vision

NeurIPS is an annual December conference on machine learning and computational neuroscience, founded in 1987 and counted among the most influential meetings in AI research.

Research historyDeep learningScience

A private research university in Ithaca, New York, founded in 1865. It is also where Frank Rosenblatt studied and worked, and where the perceptron — an early learning machine and the first neural network — was developed.

Research historyDeep learningHardware & compute

The State Internet Information Office — the Cyberspace Administration of China — is the Chinese body that manages online information content, from news licensing and website enforcement to algorithm rules and AI content labeling.

ChinaSafety & governanceData & 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