Research history Companies

Siri, Inc. was a startup spun out of SRI International in 2007 to turn decades of AI research — notably the CALO project — into a consumer virtual personal assistant; Apple acquired it in 2010.

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.

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.

A private Ivy League college in Hanover, New Hampshire, founded by royal charter in 1769. Its 1956 summer research project, proposed by John McCarthy, is credited with launching artificial intelligence as a field.

A public research university in Toronto where Geoffrey Hinton has been affiliated since 1987 and where AlexNet, the 2012 deep convolutional network, was developed.

A US public university founded in 1861, with campuses in Seattle, Bothell and Tacoma and a medical centre serving its state and region; it says it receives more federal research funding than any other US public university.

MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, hosted the AI lab that Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy co-founded, which later became CSAIL. The lab also invented Lisp machines, and Minsky co-wrote the book Perceptrons.

The University of California, Berkeley is a public land-grant research university founded in 1868, the first land-grant university in California, known for a long Nobel record, a history of student activism and top rankings among public universities.

Stanford University is a private research university in California, home to the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL) and the Institute for Human-Centered AI, which publishes the AI Index.

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.

IBM is an American technology company founded in 1911 as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company and renamed International Business Machines in 1924. Its researchers built Deep Blue, which beat Garry Kasparov in 1997, and the Watson question-answering system.

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.

IBM Research built Deep Blue, which beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, and Watson, which won Jeopardy! in 2011. Nathaniel Rochester of IBM was also one of the four signatories of the 1955 Dartmouth proposal.

DARPA is the research agency of the United States Department of Defense, created in 1958 in response to Sputnik. It states its mission as creating and preventing technological surprise, and its Grand Challenges brought autonomous vehicle work to a wider community.

MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), formed in 2003 by merging the MIT AI Lab with the Laboratory for Computer Science, is the largest laboratory on the MIT campus.

Unimation was the Connecticut company founded in 1961 by George C. Devol and Joseph F. Engelberger that built the first Unimate robot and later the PUMA series.

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.

The Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, started by John McCarthy in 1963, is associated with the Stanford arm robot design, the Stanley self-driving car and the SAIL programming language.

The Department of Machine Intelligence and Perception at the University of Edinburgh, created in October 1966 out of Donald Michie's Experimental Programming Unit, was an early British institutional home for artificial intelligence and a forerunner of the university's School of Informatics.

IJCAI is a non-profit corporation founded in California in 1969 for scientific and educational purposes; it runs the IJCAI conference series (biennial in odd years from 1969, annual since 2015) and publishes a journal and proceedings.

PARC is a Silicon Valley research center founded by Xerox in 1970, known for Ethernet, laser printing and the Alto personal computer; it became an independent company in 2002 and joined SRI International in 2023.

The MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, formed in 1970 under Marvin Minsky, grew out of MIT's earlier AI group inside Project MAC; in 2003 it merged with the Laboratory for Computer Science to form CSAIL.

ICML is the annual International Conference on Machine Learning, held every year since 1980 and organized by the International Machine Learning Society. It is the oldest of the field's main conferences and one of its three most influential venues.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A non-profit founded in 1998 that stewards the Open Source Definition and, since 2024, the Open Source AI Definition, setting a shared standard for what counts as open source.

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.

An independent, non-profit research institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, founded in 2004 with support from Eli and Edythe Broad, working to understand the roots of disease and turn biological insights into impact for patients.

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.

ICLR is an annual machine learning conference held in late April or early May, founded in 2012 by Yann LeCun and Yoshua Bengio, and known for its open peer review process.

A research institute at the University of Washington, founded in 2012 and led by David Baker, that designs new proteins for medicine and technology; its labs produced RoseTTAFold and, it says, the first computationally designed vaccine.

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.

An annual artificial intelligence conference held in Shanghai since 2018, co-hosted by Chinese government bodies and the Shanghai municipal government, combining forums, exhibitions and signed investment projects.

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.

Adept is an AI company founded in 2022 that set out to train large multimodal models and turn them into agents, open-sourced the Fuyu-8B model in 2023, and shifted focus in 2024 when its co-founders joined Amazon.

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.

A public benefit AI company that introduced itself alongside its ESM3 model in June 2024 and whose team joined Biohub in November 2025.

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.

A research institute of Abu Dhabi's Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, launched in May 2025, working from Abu Dhabi, Silicon Valley and Paris on open frontier foundation models including K2, Jais and PAN.

Honda Motor Co., Ltd. is the company that built ASIMO, the humanoid robot it announced in Tokyo on 20 November 2000, following humanoid robotics research that began in 1986 and ran through a series of experimental walking machines.

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.

The RoboCup Federation runs an international robot-soccer initiative and competition whose stated aim is to develop robotic players able to beat a human World Cup champion team.

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.

Uber ATG was Uber's self-driving unit. After a fatal 2018 crash with a pedestrian that the NTSB traced to a distracted safety operator and weak safety oversight, Uber sold the group to Aurora in December 2020.

The University of Alberta's Department of Computing Science is the institutional home of the Chinook checkers project, and the university has trained a long line of researchers who use games to test ideas in artificial intelligence.

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.

A public research university in Manchester, England, which dates its founding to 1824 and took its present form in 2004; the Manchester Baby, the first electronic stored-program computer, was built there.

University College London (UCL) is a public research university in central London. Geoffrey Hinton led its Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, and Demis Hassabis, a Gatsby postdoctoral researcher, later co-founded DeepMind.

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.

EPFL, the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, is a technical university founded in 1853 and renamed in 1969; it organizes its work around three missions: teaching, research and innovation.

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.

A public technical university in Munich, founded in 1868, where Sepp Hochreiter wrote the 1991 thesis that produced the first LSTM results, and where Jürgen Schmidhuber studied and later taught.

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.

A society for computing educators, researchers and professionals, founded in 1947 at Columbia University and headquartered in New York, with nearly 110,000 members and the Turing Award among its recognitions.

HHMI is a private biomedical research institution founded in 1953 that funds scientists at all career stages and runs the Janelia Research Campus.

A public research university in La Jolla, San Diego, founded in 1960, where connectionist neural-network research flourished in the 1980s and where data science and computing were later organised into dedicated institutes and a school.

AAAI is an international nonprofit scientific society for artificial intelligence, founded in 1979, which runs a flagship annual conference and has published a quarterly magazine since 1980.

Dragon Systems was a speech recognition company in Newton, Massachusetts, founded in 1982 by James K. Baker and Janet M. Baker. It made DragonDictate and NaturallySpeaking; its product line later passed to Nuance.

A Swiss artificial intelligence institute founded in 1988 and now a joint institute of USI and SUPSI, known for LSTM and other neural-network research.

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.

Founded in 2000 as the Singularity Institute, MIRI is a Berkeley nonprofit that was among the first to treat artificial intelligence risk as a technical research problem, and now advocates halting work on smarter-than-human AI.

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."

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.

Yitu Technology is a Chinese computer vision company founded in September 2012 by Zhu Long and Lin Chenxi. It is counted among the "CV four little dragons", alongside Megvii, SenseTime and CloudWalk, that grew out of computer vision in China's early AI industry.

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.

A nonprofit coalition of industry, academic, civil society and media organizations, formed in 2016 to guide the responsible development and use of artificial intelligence.

An independent, non-profit AI research institute in Toronto, launched in 2017 with provincial and corporate funding, with Geoffrey Hinton among its founding scientists.

The AI Now Institute is an American research institute, launched in 2017 in partnership with New York University, that studies the social implications of artificial intelligence and the concentration of power in the tech industry.

Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, launched in 2019 and co-directed by Fei-Fei Li and John Etchemendy, studies AI's opportunities and risks and houses the Center for Research on Foundation Models.

Epoch AI is a data-first research nonprofit studying the future of artificial intelligence, known for tracking AI training-compute trends, hosting databases on hardware and compute, and running independent model evaluations and its FrontierMath benchmark.

A San Francisco nonprofit founded in 2022 that researches technical AI safety, builds the field of safety researchers, and advocates for safety standards — known for a 2023 statement on AI extinction risk signed by industry leaders.

XRCE's computer-vision team competed in the ImageNet challenge and won the 2011 classification task using high-dimensional image signatures, product quantization and linear SVMs; its Fisher-vector methods performed strongly across the 2010–2014 challenges.

Tsinghua University's Institute for AI Industry Research (AIR) is an applied AI research institute set up under Zhang Yaqin, targeting the fourth industrial revolution through autonomous driving, AI plus IoT and brain-inspired intelligence.

BIGAI is a non-profit AI research institute in Beijing, led by Zhu Songchun, that works with Peking and Tsinghua universities toward a unified theory of general intelligence and general intelligent agents.

Peking University is a Chinese university that dates its founding to 1898 and reported 53,946 full-time students in a January 2026 snapshot; in September 2020 Zhu Songchun was named to lead its Institute for Artificial Intelligence.

A large comprehensive research university in China, with 47 schools, 16 disciplines on the national Double First-Class list, more graduate than undergraduate students, and 36 members of the national academies on its staff.

UCLA is the University of California's Los Angeles campus. Its own figures show a large, heavily undergraduate institution: 46,678 students in total, most of them Californians, taught by 5,464 faculty.

Redwood Research is an AI safety research group that has co-authored, with Anthropic, studies of deceptive behaviour in language models — sleeper-agent backdoors and alignment faking — as well as work on AI control protocols.