World Map of AI

Places on this map

• Bletchley Park

  The site of the British Government Code and Cypher School during the Second World War, where Turing directed the design of the "Bombe" machine, which greatly shortened the time needed to break the German Enigma cipher, and which is also the intellectual backdrop against which he proposed in 1950 the far-reaching thought experiment of the "Turing test."

  Connected figures: Alan Turing

• London

  Where Hassabis, Legg, and Suleyman together founded DeepMind, thereafter developing AlphaGo and AlphaFold; Mostaque’s Stability AI likewise settled here, making Stable Diffusion open-source and public; the Conjecture that Leahy thereafter founded also based its safety research headquarters in this city.

  Connected figures: Demis Hassabis · Shane Legg · Mustafa Suleyman · Emad Mostaque · Connor Leahy

• Oxford

  Bostrom founded at Oxford University the Future of Humanity Institute, long devoted to studying the existential risk frontier technologies such as AI may bring, and the book Superintelligence published in 2014 is the most widely known fruit of this research work.

  Connected figures: Nick Bostrom

• Lugano

  The site of the AI lab in Italian-speaking Switzerland (IDSIA) where Schmidhuber long worked, and where he and Hochreiter proposed the Long Short-Term Memory network (LSTM), thereafter for over two decades the mainstream tool for sequence-modeling tasks.

  Connected figures: Jürgen Schmidhuber

• Dartmouth College

  In 1956 McCarthy hosted here a two-month summer workshop that formally proposed the term "artificial intelligence," and Minsky, Shannon, Newell, and Simon were all participants in this meeting thereafter acknowledged as the founding mark of the discipline.

  Connected figures: John McCarthy · Marvin Minsky · Claude Shannon · Newell and Simon

• Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory

  Where Rosenblatt proposed the "perceptron" model, the first artificial neural-network model in history able, by adjusting weights, to learn classification rules autonomously from data.

  Connected figures: Frank Rosenblatt

• Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  Where Wiener proposed cybernetics; Brooks long led the AI lab here and proposed behavior-based robotics, and his student Breazeal developed here the social robot Kismet; Buolamwini’s "Gender Shades" research and Fridman’s AI podcast likewise grew from the soil of this university; Werbos too in his early years completed in the academic circle of this area his early conceptual exploration of the backpropagation algorithm.

  Connected figures: Norbert Wiener · Rodney Brooks · Cynthia Breazeal · Joy Buolamwini · Lex Fridman · Paul Werbos

• IBM Watson Research Center

  While working at IBM, Samuel proposed the term "machine learning" and wrote a checkers-playing program; forty years later, in the continuation of this research tradition, IBM’s own "Deep Blue" beat chess world champion Kasparov in 1997.

  Connected figures: Arthur Samuel · Garry Kasparov

• University of California, Los Angeles

  Pearl long taught here, proposing Bayesian networks and the theory of causal inference, which gave AI systems a rigorous mathematical foundation for reasoning under uncertainty.

  Connected figures: Judea Pearl

• Toronto

  Hinton held to neural-network research at the University of Toronto for decades, and in 2012 his students Sutskever and Krizhevsky designed here AlexNet, which at a stroke ignited the wave of the deep-learning revival.

  Connected figures: Geoffrey Hinton · Ilya Sutskever

• Montreal

  Bengio built at the University of Montreal the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (Mila), where Goodfellow proposed the conception of the generative adversarial network.

  Connected figures: Yoshua Bengio · Ian Goodfellow

• Bell Labs

  Where LeCun developed the LeNet convolutional neural network for recognizing handwritten digits on cheques; Vapnik too, while working here, proposed the support vector machine, for over a decade before the rise of deep learning the mainstream first choice for classification tasks.

  Connected figures: Yann LeCun · Vladimir Vapnik

• Stanford University

  Where Fei-Fei Li directed the building of the ImageNet dataset; the machine-learning course Andrew Ng taught here drew millions of learners after being made into a free online course; Gebru too completed her doctoral studies here; Rumelhart likewise taught here in his later years, studying the theory of parallel distributed processing.

  Connected figures: Fei-Fei Li · Andrew Ng · Timnit Gebru · David Rumelhart

• San Francisco (OpenAI)

  Altman with Brockman, Murati, Schulman, and others together ran OpenAI here, releasing ChatGPT in 2022 and the next year going through the board crisis that shook the whole industry; Howard’s fast.ai likewise based its education outreach in this city.

  Connected figures: Sam Altman · Greg Brockman · Mira Murati · John Schulman · Jeremy Howard

• San Francisco (Anthropic)

  Amodei with his sister Daniela and several other researchers who came out of OpenAI founded Anthropic here, and Leike, after resigning as head of OpenAI’s "superalignment" team, also joined here to continue AI-safety research.

  Connected figures: Dario Amodei · Jan Leike

• Berkeley

  Russell long taught at the University of California, Berkeley, proposing the theory of "human-compatible" AI; the Machine Intelligence Research Institute that Yudkowsky founded likewise settled here; Christiano’s Alignment Research Center too was set up in this Bay Area city.

  Connected figures: Stuart Russell · Eliezer Yudkowsky · Paul Christiano

• Fremont (Tesla)

  Musk’s Tesla pushed here the development of its "full self-driving" system, and Hotz and, thereafter, Karpathy who succeeded to his post successively led this pure-vision self-driving vision team.

  Connected figures: Elon Musk · George Hotz · Andrej Karpathy

• Santa Clara (Nvidia)

  Home to Huang’s Nvidia headquarters, where in 2006 it launched the CUDA platform, a decade later at last cashing in, on the wave of deep learning, its strategic bet on becoming the core supplier of AI compute infrastructure.

  Connected figures: Jensen Huang

• Mountain View (Google)

  Dean co-founded Google Brain here, and eight researchers within the team completed here in 2017 the paper "Attention Is All You Need"; Devlin designed BERT here, and Radford thereafter at OpenAI designed along the decoder line the earliest version of the GPT series; Pichai thereafter also directed the merging and consolidation of Google Brain and DeepMind here.

  Connected figures: Jeff Dean · The "Transformer Eight" · Jacob Devlin · Alec Radford · Sundar Pichai

• Redmond (Microsoft)

  Home to Nadella’s Microsoft headquarters, which from 2019 made several rounds of strategic investment in OpenAI and deeply integrated its technical capability into core product lines such as Copilot.

  Connected figures: Satya Nadella

• Menlo Park

  Home to Zuckerberg’s Meta headquarters, which directed the release of the Llama series of large models in open-weight form; the venture-capital firm Greylock Partners where Hoffman long worked likewise settled here.

  Connected figures: Mark Zuckerberg · Reid Hoffman

• Edmonton

  Sutton long taught at the University of Alberta, systematically building the theoretical foundation of reinforcement learning; Silver studied for his doctorate here under Sutton, a training that thereafter deeply shaped the technical thinking of his lead design of AlphaGo.

  Connected figures: Richard Sutton · David Silver

• New York University

  Marcus long taught at New York University, one of the most active public critics of the current mainstream deep-learning technical path; Asimov too long settled in New York in his later years, writing in this city a great body of science fiction including the "Three Laws of Robotics."

  Connected figures: Gary Marcus · Isaac Asimov

• La Jolla

  Sejnowski long worked at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, proposing the Boltzmann machine together with Hinton and developing the NETtalk system able to "learn" the pronunciation rules of English.

  Connected figures: Terrence Sejnowski

• Beijing

  Home to Robin Li’s Baidu headquarters, which in 2014 hired Andrew Ng as chief scientist; the Sinovation Ventures that Kai-Fu Lee founded likewise settled here, long backing homegrown Chinese AI startups.

  Connected figures: Robin Li · Kai-Fu Lee

• Hangzhou

  Home to the DeepSeek headquarters that Liang Wenfeng founded, whose model released in early 2025, at a training cost far below industry expectation, prompted a worldwide market rethink of the compute narrative.

  Connected figures: Liang Wenfeng

• Seoul

  In 2016 Lee Sedol played here a five-game match against DeepMind’s AlphaGo, at last losing by one win and four losses, the first time AI cracked Go, a field previously seen as the last stronghold of human intuition.

  Connected figures: Lee Sedol