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

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

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

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

Reka AI is an AI research lab building models and infrastructure for the physical AI era. Its releases include reka-flash-3, a 21-billion-parameter reasoning model, and Reka Edge, a 7-billion-parameter vision-language model designed to run on devices at the edge.

Large language modelsMultimodalRobotics

Runway is a New York-based AI video company founded in 2018. It co-released Stable Diffusion in 2022, has built a series of video models from Gen-1 to Gen-4.5, and in February 2026 raised $315 million at a $5.3 billion valuation.

EnterpriseMultimodalGenerative models

SenseTime is a Chinese AI company founded in October 2014 and listed in Hong Kong at the end of 2021. It develops the SenseNova large models and, in 2026, reported its first IFRS net profit since listing.

Large language modelsChinaEnterprise

SRI International is a non-profit research institute in Menlo Park, California, founded in 1946 as the Stanford Research Institute. Its AI Center built Shakey the robot, and its later work led to Siri.

Research historyRoboticsComputer vision