Companies

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

Black Forest Labs is a German AI lab based in Freiburg im Breisgau, founded in 2024 by Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann and Patrick Esser. It develops the FLUX image models and raised a $300 million Series B in December 2025.

Open sourceGenerative modelsCreative tools

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

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

Insilico Medicine is a drug discovery company founded in the United States in 2014 that pairs an AI software platform, Pharma.AI, with its own pipeline of drug programmes and automated laboratory work.

ChinaEnterpriseGenerative models

Kuaishou Technology is a Beijing-based short-video and live-streaming company, founded in 2011 as GIF Kuaishou. It listed in Hong Kong in 2021 and builds the Kling video generation model.

ChinaConsumer appsGenerative models

Luma AI is a generative AI company founded in 2021 in Redwood City, California, known for the Dream Machine video app, the Ray3 video model and the Luma Agents platform, with more than $1.1 billion raised.

MultimodalGenerative modelsCreative tools

Megvii is a Chinese computer vision company founded in 2011 by three Tsinghua graduates. Its Face++ cloud platform opened face recognition to developers, and it was the earliest founded of the "CV four little dragons."

Research historyChinaEnterprise

Microsoft's corporate research division, founded in 1991, whose researchers produced work such as the ResNet image-recognition architecture and helped build features used in Kinect, Bing, HoloLens, Cortana and Microsoft Translator.

Research historyEnterpriseDeep learning

Microsoft Research Asia is Microsoft's research laboratory in the Asia-Pacific region, founded in Beijing in November 1998. It works on artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction and related fields, and its researchers have included the first author of the ResNet paper.

Research historyChinaDeep learning

Midjourney is a San Francisco-based independent research lab that runs an image generator. Founded and led by David Holz, it has never taken outside funding and has been involved in several copyright lawsuits.

Consumer appsGenerative modelsCreative tools

Mila, the Quebec AI Institute, is a Montreal deep-learning institute founded in 1993 by Yoshua Bengio as LISA; its graduates include Ian Goodfellow and Hugo Larochelle.

Research historyOpen sourceDeep learning

MiniMax is a Shanghai-based AI company founded in December 2021 by computer-vision researchers from SenseTime. It builds text, speech and video models and consumer apps such as Talkie and Hailuo AI, and listed in Hong Kong in January 2026.

Large language modelsOpen sourceChina

New York University, chartered in 1831 and centred on Washington Square Park, is a private research university whose Courant Institute and Center for Data Science made it a home for machine learning research and data science training.

Research historyDeep learningComputer vision

NVIDIA Research is the research arm of the chipmaker NVIDIA, founded in 2006 with more than 200 scientists. It leads work on AI, self-driving cars, high-performance computing and graphics, and it builds the company's open Nemotron language models.

Open sourceFoundation modelsRobotics

PixVerse, founded in 2023 as Aishi Technology, is an AI video generation company whose in-house models power a web app, an API and agent tools; a March 2026 Series C made it a unicorn.

ChinaEnterpriseGenerative models

Poolside is an AI company building models for software work; in April 2026 it released the Laguna M.1 and Laguna XS.2 models and pool, the agent runtime behind its reinforcement learning.

Large language modelsEnterpriseDeveloper tools

Princeton University, chartered in 1746 as the College of New Jersey, is where Turing, McCarthy and Minsky took their doctorates and where Fei-Fei Li began ImageNet; seventeen Turing Award laureates have been affiliated with it.

Research historyData & datasetsComputer vision

The Recording Industry Association of America is the US trade body for companies that make and distribute recorded music. It lobbies, runs research, issues Gold and Platinum awards, and in 2024 sued two AI music generators.

Consumer appsSafety & governanceCreative tools