Organizations
The labs, companies and universities the people on this site lead, work at, or came from.
The labs
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Anthropic
Anthropic is the San Francisco company that builds the Claude models and the Claude Code agent. Seven OpenAI researchers and managers founded it in 2021 on the argument that the risks of powerful AI can only be studied by build...
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Google DeepMind
Google DeepMind is Alphabet's frontier AI lab, formed in April 2023 when Google merged DeepMind, the London lab it bought in 2014, with its own Google Brain team. It builds the Gemini models behind Google's chatbot and products...
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Meta
Meta's AI effort began as FAIR, the research lab Mark Zuckerberg asked Yann LeCun to build in 2013, and became the main corporate champion of open-weight models with the Llama releases of 2023 to 2025. After Llama 4 disappointe...
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Microsoft
Microsoft is the Redmond software and cloud company that bankrolled OpenAI from 2019, built the Azure supercomputers that trained its models and took about 27 percent of the company. Since March 2024 it has also had its own fro...
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Mistral AI
Mistral AI is a Paris company that trains large language models and sells them, with its own chat assistant, coding agent and cloud, to businesses and governments that want AI they can run and control themselves. Founded in 202...
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NVIDIA
NVIDIA designs the graphics processors and CUDA software on which most AI models are trained and run, and sells them as whole data-center systems. It is a public company run since 1993 by its co-founder Jensen Huang. It does no...
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OpenAI
OpenAI makes the GPT models, ChatGPT and the Codex coding agent. It began in December 2015 as a donor-funded nonprofit meant to build artificial general intelligence for the benefit of humanity, added a capped-profit company in...
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Safe Superintelligence Inc.
Safe Superintelligence Inc. is the lab Ilya Sutskever started a month after leaving OpenAI, on the premise that one company with "one goal and one product" could build superintelligence while keeping safety ahead of capability...
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Thinking Machines Lab
Thinking Machines Lab is the company Mira Murati started after leaving OpenAI, staffed at launch by about 30 researchers, most of them from OpenAI. Its bet is customization rather than one general assistant: Tinker, a service f...
The alumni map
Each line is a group of people who left a lab and founded a new organization. The notes give their reasons, in their own accounts, with sources.
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OpenAI from Google DeepMind
Sutskever left Google Brain to co-found OpenAI as research director after Elon Musk and Sam Altman recruited him with the pitch of an open, nonprofit lab. Source
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Cohere from Google DeepMind
Aidan Gomez, Nick Frosst, Ivan Zhang
Gomez, a transformer co-author as a Google Brain intern, co-founded the Toronto company to sell language models to businesses. Source
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Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei, Jared Kaplan, Chris Olah, Tom Brown, Jack Clark
Dario Amodei said the group left because it believed scaling had to be paired with alignment work; OpenAI has not publicly disputed that account. Source
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Character.AI from Google DeepMind
Noam Shazeer, Daniel De Freitas
The pair left after Google declined to release their chatbot, the Wall Street Journal reported; Google rehired both in an August 2024 licensing deal. Source
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Inflection AI from Google DeepMind
Mustafa Suleyman, Karén Simonyan
Suleyman left Google in January 2022, after his 2019 leave from DeepMind, and co-founded Inflection with Hoffman and the former DeepMind researcher Simonyan; Microsoft hired most of its staff in March 2024. Source
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Mistral AI from Meta
Guillaume Lample, Timothée Lacroix
Lample and Lacroix, FAIR researchers who worked on LLaMA, left weeks after its release to found the Paris company with Arthur Mensch of Google DeepMind. Source
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Sakana AI from Google DeepMind
David Ha, Llion Jones, Ren Ito
Ha, who had led Google Brain's research team in Japan, and Jones, a transformer co-author, founded a Tokyo lab working on nature-inspired methods such as model merging. Source
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Mistral AI from Google DeepMind
Mensch left Google DeepMind to co-found the Paris company with two former Meta researchers; it raised a 113 million dollar seed round in June 2023. Source
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Reflection AI from Google DeepMind
Misha Laskin, Ioannis Antonoglou
Laskin led reward modeling for Gemini and Antonoglou co-created AlphaGo; the company raised 2 billion dollars in October 2025 to build open frontier models. Source
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Physical Intelligence from Google DeepMind
Karol Hausman, Brian Ichter, Sergey Levine, Chelsea Finn
Hausman, a robotics scientist at Google, co-founded the company with Berkeley and Stanford researchers to build general models for controlling robots. Source
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Safe Superintelligence Inc. from OpenAI
Sutskever left in May 2024, six months after voting to remove Altman, and co-founded a lab that plans no product before a safe superintelligence. Source
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LeCun left after twelve years to pursue world models outside Meta, which he said had become focused on language models; Meta agreed to partner with the company without investing. Source
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Thinking Machines Lab from OpenAI
Mira Murati, John Schulman, Barret Zoph, Lilian Weng, Luke Metz
Founded by former CTO Mira Murati five months after leaving OpenAI to "do my own exploration"; Zoph and Metz returned to OpenAI in January 2026. Source
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Metis Reasoning from Google DeepMind
Thore Graepel
Graepel, a co-creator of AlphaGo at DeepMind, launched the London company in October with Piers Ingram and others to pursue what it calls a compute-efficient alternative to frontier language models. Source
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Emulate from Google DeepMind
Jack Parker-Holder, Matthew McGill, Philip Ball
Three researchers from DeepMind's world-model team, including one of the principal researchers on Genie 3, founded the startup in August 2026 to build world models. Source
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Discovery Loop from Google DeepMind
Jeff Dean, Oriol Vinyals, Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le
The four left on 5 August 2026, the day Hassabis stepped back, to automate the research loop; Google is a founding investor and cloud partner. Source
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Ineffable Intelligence from Google DeepMind
Silver, who led AlphaGo and the reinforcement learning group, left in January 2026 to build a system that learns from its own experience rather than human data. Source
Other organizations
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Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI) Labs is a frontier AI research company founded in late 2025 by Yann LeCun, its executive chairman, with Alexandre LeBrun as CEO. It builds world models trained on video and sensor d...
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The Distributed AI Research Institute, founded by Timnit Gebru on 2 December 2021 with $3.7 million from the Ford, MacArthur, Kapor Center and Open Society foundations, is an independent, community-rooted research ins...
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Education company founded by Andrew Ng in 2017 that publishes AI courses, from the Deep Learning Specialization to short courses on agentic workflows and prompting, and the weekly newsletter The Batch, which carries N...
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An AI research company founded by David Silver, incorporated in November 2025, whose stated mission is to make first contact with superintelligence by building a reinforcement learning "superlearner" that discovers kn...
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A nonprofit AI safety research organization founded by Yoshua Bengio in June 2025 and incubated at Mila, building non-agentic "Scientist AI" systems designed to be safe by design and to act as guardrails for other AI.
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Home of the Stanford AI Lab, which Andrew Ng and Fei-Fei Li each directed, and of the Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI), co-founded by Li in 2019 and merged with Stanford Data Science in May 2026, when Li became S...
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The Université de Montréal, where Yoshua Bengio has been a professor since 1993 and where he founded Mila, the Quebec AI institute run jointly with McGill, which he directed until 2025 and which incubated his nonprofi...
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Geoffrey Hinton's academic home since 1987, now as University Professor Emeritus, where his students built AlexNet in 2012 and where he co-founded the Vector Institute in 2017.
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Public research university in Seattle and Emily M. Bender's academic home since 2003, where she directs the Computational Linguistics Laboratory and the professional master's program in computational linguistics she l...
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A spatial-intelligence company co-founded in 2024 by Fei-Fei Li, Justin Johnson, Ben Mildenhall and Christoph Lassner. It builds world models that generate and reason about 3D environments; its first product, Marble,...