Who's who in AI

The labs, chip makers, open-source projects, apps and institutes behind the AI age.

Frontier labs

The labs building the most capable general models.

  • OpenAI: US AI company behind ChatGPT, the GPT models and Codex, run as a public benefit corporation.
  • Anthropic: US AI safety and research company that makes the Claude models, the Claude apps and Claude Code.
  • Google DeepMind: Alphabet's AI lab, maker of the Gemini models, AlphaFold and AlphaGo.
  • Meta Superintelligence Labs: Meta's AI division, which builds the Muse models behind Meta AI and once made the Llama models.
  • SpaceXAI (formerly xAI): Elon Musk's AI company behind Grok, now part of SpaceX and renamed SpaceXAI.
  • Mistral AI: Paris-based maker of open-weight and business AI models, with its own AI cloud.
  • Microsoft AI: Microsoft's in-house AI division, led by Mustafa Suleyman, which builds the MAI models.
  • Thinking Machines Lab: Mira Murati's AI lab, maker of the Tinker fine-tuning service and the open-weight Inkling models.
  • Safe Superintelligence Inc.: Ilya Sutskever's research lab with a single stated goal: building a safe superintelligence.

Chinese labs

China's model makers, from open-weight specialists to the tech giants.

  • DeepSeek: Hangzhou AI company known for low-cost, MIT-licensed open-weight models such as DeepSeek-R1 and V4.
  • Qwen (Alibaba): Alibaba's AI model team, maker of the widely used Qwen open-weight models and the Qwen app.
  • Moonshot AI: Beijing AI company behind the Kimi assistant and Kimi K3, a 2.8-trillion-parameter open-weight model.
  • Z.ai (Zhipu AI): Beijing maker of the GLM models, the first of China's AI tigers to list in Hong Kong.
  • MiniMax: Shanghai maker of the MiniMax M language models, video, speech and music models, and the Talkie app.
  • ByteDance Seed: ByteDance's AI research team, maker of the Seed models behind Doubao, Seedance video and Seedream images.
  • Baidu: Chinese search company that builds the ERNIE models, the ERNIE Assistant and the Apollo Go robotaxis.
  • Tencent Hunyuan: Tencent's foundation model team, maker of the Hunyuan (Hy) models behind the Yuanbao assistant.

Open-source projects

Models, tools and agents anyone can download, run and change.

  • Hugging Face: The main public hub for sharing open AI models, datasets and demo apps
  • OpenClaw: Open-source personal AI agent that runs on your own computer and works through chat apps
  • llama.cpp: Open-source C/C++ engine for running language models locally on everyday hardware
  • Ollama: Open-source tool for downloading and running open-weight AI models on your own computer
  • vLLM: Open-source engine for serving large language models quickly and cheaply at scale
  • Model Context Protocol: Open standard for connecting AI apps and agents to outside tools and data
  • EleutherAI: Non-profit research institute building open AI models, datasets and evaluation tools
  • LangChain: Company behind the LangChain and LangGraph open-source agent frameworks and LangSmith

Chips & compute

The chips, clouds and data centres AI runs on.

  • NVIDIA: Maker of the GPUs, systems and software widely used to train and run AI models
  • AMD: Chipmaker selling Instinct AI GPUs, EPYC server CPUs and rack-scale AI systems
  • Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company: Contract chipmaker that manufactures chips designed by other companies, including AI chips
  • ASML: Dutch maker of the lithography machines needed to produce the most advanced chips
  • Google Cloud TPU: Google's custom AI chips, used for Gemini and rented to others through Google Cloud
  • AWS Trainium: Amazon Web Services' own AI training and inference chips, rented through its cloud
  • Cerebras Systems: Maker of wafer-scale AI chips and a fast inference cloud, listed on Nasdaq
  • Groq: AI inference cloud company that created the LPU chip, now licensed to NVIDIA
  • CoreWeave: AI cloud provider renting large NVIDIA GPU clusters to AI labs and enterprises
  • Huawei Ascend: Huawei's line of AI chips and the SuperPoD systems built from them

AI apps & SaaS

Products built on models: assistants, coding tools, search, media.

  • Cursor: AI code editor and coding agent made by Anysphere, a subsidiary of SpaceX since August 2026
  • Perplexity: AI answer engine that searches the web and cites its sources, plus the Comet browser and agents
  • Cognition: Maker of Devin, an AI software engineer, and Devin Desktop, the editor that succeeded Windsurf
  • Midjourney: Independent, self-funded AI lab known for its image and video generation models
  • ElevenLabs: AI audio company making text-to-speech, voice and conversational agent products
  • Suno: AI music generator that turns text prompts into complete songs
  • Runway: AI video company behind the Gen video models, now also building world models
  • Harvey: AI platform for law firms and corporate legal teams
  • Scale AI: Supplies data to train and test AI models and builds AI applications; Meta owns 49%

Embodied AI & robotics

AI in physical machines: humanoids, robot foundation models, self-driving.

  • Figure AI: Humanoid robot maker building Figure 03 and the Helix robot AI model
  • Tesla: Electric car and energy company building the Optimus humanoid robot and self-driving cars
  • Boston Dynamics: Robotics company behind the Spot, Stretch and Atlas robots, owned by Hyundai
  • Physical Intelligence: Builds general-purpose AI models, the π series, that let many kinds of robot do many tasks
  • Waymo: Alphabet's self-driving company, running driverless robotaxi services in US cities
  • Unitree Robotics: Chinese maker of four-legged and humanoid robots, listed in Shanghai since August 2026
  • 1X Technologies: Humanoid robot company building NEO, a robot designed to do chores in the home

AI security & safety

Securing AI systems, and AI for security; safety institutes and evaluators.

  • AI Security Institute: UK government research body that tests advanced AI models for security risks
  • Center for Advancing Innovation and Standards for Super Intelligence: US government centre at NIST that tests commercial AI models; formerly CAISI and the US AI Safety Institute
  • METR: Non-profit that measures how well frontier AI models can carry out long tasks on their own
  • Apollo Research: AI safety company that studies and monitors scheming and deception in frontier AI systems
  • Irregular: Israeli AI security lab that tests frontier models for cyber misuse and resilience; formerly Pattern Labs
  • Protect AI: AI and machine learning security company, acquired by Palo Alto Networks in July 2025
  • XBOW: Seattle company whose AI agents carry out autonomous penetration testing

Research institutes

Universities, non-profits and public institutes shaping the field.