Companies

Agility Robotics builds Digit, a bipedal mobile manipulation robot, and assembles it at its own factory in Salem, Oregon. The company has tested the robot with Amazon and deployed it with a logistics customer under a multi-year agreement.

EnterpriseRoboticsHumanoid robots

Apptronik is an Austin robotics company spun out of a University of Texas lab in 2016 that builds the Apollo humanoid robot and has signed commercial deals with Mercedes-Benz and GXO Logistics.

EnterpriseRoboticsHumanoid robots

A British multinational design and engineering firm founded in 1946 by Sir Ove Arup, known for complex landmark projects such as the Sydney Opera House and for ownership held in trust for its employees.

EnterpriseSafety & governanceIndustrial automation

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 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

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 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

Covariant is a robotics AI company founded in 2017 by researchers largely from UC Berkeley; in 2024 Amazon hired its founders and took a non-exclusive licence to its robotics foundation models.

EnterpriseFoundation modelsRobotics

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

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

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

A London-headquartered AI research organisation formed in 2023 by merging DeepMind with Google's Brain team, known for AlphaGo, AlphaFold and the Gemini model family.

Research historyDeep learningFoundation models

Google's research division, based in Mountain View and usually dated to 2000, produced the Transformer, BERT and T5 — the work underlying modern large language models.

Large language modelsResearch historyDeep learning

Huawei's artificial intelligence research centre, founded in 2012 and part of the company's 2012 Laboratories, with sites in China, Hong Kong, Europe and Canada and research spanning vision, language, search and recommendation, and decision-making.

ChinaEnterpriseDeep learning