Who builds the future
The organisations shaping AI — what they build, where they come from, and what they are known for.
Five companies that shaped AI
OpenAI
Creators of the GPT models, DALL-E, Whisper and ChatGPT, whose launch in November 2022 brought AI chat to hundreds of millions of people. Microsoft has been a major partner and investor since 2019.
Google DeepMind
DeepMind was acquired by Google in 2014; its AlphaGo beat world champion Lee Sedol in 2016, and AlphaFold predicted protein structures — work recognised with the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. It merged with Google Brain in 2023 and builds the Gemini models.
Anthropic
Founded by former OpenAI researchers including Dario and Daniela Amodei. Builds the Claude family and focuses on AI safety — helpful, harmless and honest AI — through Constitutional AI and its Responsible Scaling Policy.
Meta AI
Meta's AI research lab created PyTorch, the widely used deep-learning framework, and releases open models such as Llama, SAM and NLLB for anyone to run.
Mistral AI
A European AI company building efficient, open-weight language models, from Mistral 7B to the mixture-of-experts Mixtral, alongside commercial models and the Le Chat assistant.
The growing AI ecosystem
xAI
Founded in 2023; builds the Grok models.
Stability AI
London; released Stable Diffusion in 2022.
Runway
New York; video generation and editing tools for creators.
Midjourney
San Francisco; an independent lab known for its image generator.
Cohere
Toronto, founded 2019; language models for businesses.
Hugging Face
Founded 2016; the largest open hub for models and datasets, and the Transformers library.
DeepSeek
Hangzhou, founded 2023; open models including DeepSeek-V3 and R1.
Alibaba Cloud
Builds the open Qwen family of models.
Microsoft
OpenAI's partner, and maker of the small Phi models.
NVIDIA
The GPUs and CUDA software most AI models are trained and run on.
What they make
See each company's landmark models, and which open ones run locally, in the models directory.