Companies

Amazon is the American technology company founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994. Through Amazon Web Services it became a major cloud provider, and it has built its own AI models, chips and assistants, including the Nova models and Trainium chips.

EnterpriseConsumer appsFoundation models

AMD is a chip designer whose data center AI business centres on Instinct GPUs and APUs, expanded through the Xilinx and ZT Systems acquisitions and capped by a 6-gigawatt OpenAI supply deal.

Open sourceHardware & computeDeveloper tools

Apple is a US technology company founded in 1976 that makes the iPhone, iPad and Mac. It introduced Apple Intelligence in 2024, builds its own Apple Foundation Models, and in 2026 agreed to build its next models with Google.

Consumer appsFoundation modelsHardware & compute

Aurora Innovation is a self-driving technology company founded in 2017 that went public in 2021 and began regular driverless commercial trucking between Dallas and Houston in April 2025.

EnterpriseRoboticsHardware & compute

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

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

A robotics company spun out of MIT in 1992, known for legged and humanoid machines such as BigDog, Atlas, Spot and Handle, and now majority-owned by Hyundai Motor Group.

EnterpriseProduct historyRobotics

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

Cerebras Systems is an American AI chip company founded in 2015 that builds wafer-scale processors — single chips made from a whole silicon wafer — and the computers around them, from the WSE and CS-1 to the WSE-3 and CS-3.

Large language modelsHardware & computeCloud

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

American energy company headquartered in Baltimore, one of the largest electricity producers in the United States, known for its 2024 agreement to restart Three Mile Island Unit 1.

Hardware & computeCloudIndustrial automation

A New Jersey cloud company that began as an ethereum miner and became a large-scale GPU computing provider for AI, backed by NVIDIA and listed on Nasdaq in 2025 alongside a major OpenAI deal.

EnterpriseHardware & computeData & datasets

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

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

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

Google, part of Alphabet, works on AI at several levels at once: it designs its own TPU chips, trains large language models such as PaLM and Gemini, and brought its research labs together as Google DeepMind in 2023.

Consumer appsFoundation modelsHardware & compute

Google Brain was a deep-learning research team started inside Google's X in 2011. Its cat-recognition experiment, TensorFlow, sequence-to-sequence models and the Transformer made it central to modern AI; it merged into Google DeepMind in 2023.

Research historyDeep learningHardware & compute