Large language models Companies

Microsoft is an American technology company founded in 1975 and headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Its AI work combines a partnership with OpenAI, the Copilot products and its own in-house MAI and Phi models.

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]

Meta AI is the AI research and model-building organisation of Meta Platforms. Founded in late 2013 as Facebook AI Research, it produced PyTorch and the Llama and Muse model families, and it is separate from the Meta AI assistant product.

OpenAI is a San Francisco AI research and deployment company founded in 2015 as a nonprofit. It makes the GPT model family and ChatGPT and filed confidentially for an IPO in June 2026.

Anthropic is an AI safety and research company founded in January 2021 by former OpenAI employees. It develops the Claude models and products, and its Responsible Scaling Policy sets out safety levels for its models.

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.

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the main scientific and professional society for natural language processing. Founded in 1962, it runs one of the field's two leading conferences and publishes the journal Computational Linguistics.

Tencent is a Chinese internet company founded in 1998, known for QQ, WeChat and video games. Since 2023 its Hunyuan model line has been its main AI effort, later branded Hy.

iFlytek is a Chinese information technology company founded in 1999 and headquartered in Hefei. It is known for speech technology and for its Spark large language models, first released on 6 May 2023.

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.

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.

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.

Databricks is a San Francisco software company founded in 2013 by seven people behind Apache Spark, which grew out of the University of California, Berkeley AMPLab project [1][2]. Its valuation rose from $38 billion in 2021 to $188 billion in 2026 [4][11].

Nonprofit AI research institute founded by Paul Allen in 2014 and based in Seattle, known for Semantic Scholar and for the openly released OLMo family of language models, whose training data, code and checkpoints are published alongside the weights.

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.

AI21 Labs is an Israeli AI company founded in Tel Aviv in November 2017 that builds large language models, including the Jurassic and Jamba families, and the Wordtune writing assistant.

Zhipu AI, also known as Z.ai, is a Beijing company founded in 2019 as a Tsinghua University spin-out. It develops the GLM model family and related chatbot, video, agent and coding products, and listed in Hong Kong in January 2026.

Cohere is a Toronto-based enterprise AI company founded in 2019. It builds the Command family of language models, sells them to businesses, and in September 2026 signed a definitive agreement to combine with Aleph Alpha.

MBZUAI, the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, is a graduate AI university in Abu Dhabi, founded in 2019. It hosts the Institute of Foundation Models, which builds the K2, Jais and PAN model lines.

EleutherAI is a grassroots AI research collective that began as a Discord server in July 2020. It released The Pile and the open GPT-style models GPT-Neo, GPT-J and GPT-NeoX-20B, and in 2023 it became a nonprofit research institute.

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.

Perplexity AI is a San Francisco company founded on 22 August 2022 by Aravind Srinivas and others. It runs an AI answer engine that cites web sources and has since added models, a browser and agents.

Chinese AI company founded in Beijing in 2023 by Tsinghua schoolfriends Yang Zhilin, Zhou Xinyu and Wu Yuxin; maker of the long-context Kimi assistant and the K-series models, and one of China's fastest-rising model developers by valuation.

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.

xAI is an AI company founded by Elon Musk that builds the Grok models and chatbot. It was acquired by SpaceX in 2026 and has since been renamed SpaceXAI and then SpaceXSI.

Mistral AI is a Paris-based company founded in April 2023. It builds open-weight and commercial large language models, the Le Chat assistant and the Vibe coding agent, and it has grown quickly through several large funding rounds.

StepFun (阶跃星辰) is a Shanghai AI company founded in April 2023 by former Microsoft staff. It builds multimodal Step-series models and has open-sourced several of them.

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.

Sakana AI is a Tokyo research and development company founded in July 2023 by David Ha, Ren Ito and Llion Jones, known for evolutionary model merging, projects such as The AI Scientist, and Japanese-language models named Namazu.

Microsoft AI is the consumer AI organisation Microsoft formed in March 2024 to advance Copilot and its other AI products and research, led by Mustafa Suleyman. It develops the MAI family of in-house models.

Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI) is an American AI company founded in June 2024 by Ilya Sutskever, Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy to build a safe superintelligence as its only product, without releasing anything in between.

LMSYS (Large Model Systems) is a non-profit that started as a multi-university collaboration in 2023 and became an incorporated organisation in September 2024, building open models, serving systems and evaluation platforms such as Chatbot Arena, SGLang, FastChat and Vicuna.

Arena Intelligence is the company formed in 2025 by the team behind Chatbot Arena; it runs the LMArena model-comparison platform and states that it has 250 million dollars in venture funding.

Thinking Machines Lab is a San Francisco AI company founded in February 2025 by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati. It built Tinker, an API for fine-tuning open-weight models, and released the open-weight Inkling model.

The Technology Innovation Institute is a research centre of Abu Dhabi's Advanced Technology Research Council that works across ten technology fields and develops the Falcon family of language models, releasing model weights, technical reports and its own licence.

Sarvam AI is an Indian company building a sovereign AI stack; its Sarvam-M, a post-trained 24-billion-parameter Mistral Small released under Apache-2.0, reports large gains on Indian-language benchmarks.

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.

Snowflake is a cloud data platform company that also builds its own open language models; its Arctic model pairs a dense transformer with a sparse mixture of experts and shipped under Apache 2.0.

Sierra is a company co-founded by Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor that helps businesses build customer experiences with AI agents, positioning the technology as augmentation of human staff rather than replacement.

Meituan's LongCat team released LongCat-Flash, a 560-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts language model that activates roughly 27 billion parameters per token on average and ships with open weights under the MIT licence.

Aleph Alpha is the company behind Kolibri, an open-weight model released on 3 October 2026 and built around data sovereignty and German-language specialisation rather than raw scale.

LG AI Research is the organisation behind EXAONE, a family of large language models it documents in technical reports and releases under its own EXAONE licence.

Liquid AI is an MIT CSAIL spin-out that calls itself an efficiency-first foundation model company, arguing that models should run on local devices; its LFM3-Omni-2B is an omni-modal model published in October 2026.

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.

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.

A French-language public research university in Montreal, founded in 1878 and autonomous since 1919, known today as a centre of deep-learning research and the home institution of Yoshua Bengio and Mila.

A public research university in Beijing's Haidian district, founded in 1911 as Tsinghua College. It is now a major centre for computer science and AI research, with which Turing laureate Andrew Yao, ResNet author Kaiming He and spin-out Zhipu AI are associated.

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.

Writer is an enterprise AI company founded in 2020 by May Habib and Waseem AlShikh, selling brand-aware agents and governance tools to large companies, and publishing the Palmyra-mini family of small open models.

Langboat Technology is a Chinese AI company founded in June 2021 and incubated at Sinovation Ventures; it develops the in-house Mengzi model family and sells an enterprise agent platform and applications built on it.

Character.AI is a chatbot company founded in 2021 by former Google engineers Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, known for user-created AI characters; it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in October 2026.

A Chinese AI company founded in 2022 under Tsinghua associate professor Liu Zhiyuan, known for the MiniCPM on-device model series, multimodal and speech models, and the ForgeTrain training framework.

Inflection AI is an American AI company founded in 2022 by Reid Hoffman, Mustafa Suleyman and Karén Simonyan. It built the chatbot Pi and, in 2024, moved most of its staff and technology to Microsoft.