ai-research
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USC’s Center for Public Relations measures the courage to speak
The people paid to speak for companies are reconsidering when to speak at all. At USC Annenberg, a research center turns that hesitation into something the industry can study.
The Curiosity Machine: How SightX Turned Slow, Expensive Market Research Into Something You Can Finish Before Lunch
For a decade, SightX chased a stubborn idea: that testing a price, a package, or an ad should not require three vendors and a month of waiting. Then it taught an AI to do the asking.
Nitrode
Nitrode is a San Francisco AI research company building the evaluation, data, and post-training layer for game development. It started in Y Combinator's Winter 2025 batch as a Godot-based AI game engine that let anyone prototype a 3D game in a day, then pivoted toward frontier research: it runs GameEngineBench, a benchmark that scores how well AI models handle real game-engine coding tasks, and produces expert-labeled datasets and reinforcement-learning environments (including Unreal Engine 5) for AI labs and enterprises. Nitrode's bet is that game development will be handled by systems of specialized models working together, not one general-purpose model.
Inception
Inception builds diffusion-based large language models (dLLMs) that generate text in parallel instead of one token at a time. Its flagship Mercury family is positioned as the first commercial-scale diffusion LLM, reporting 5–10x faster throughput than traditional autoregressive models at competitive quality, with Mercury Coder targeting code generation and Mercury 2 reasoning workloads.
Axiom
Axiom (Axiom Math) is a Palo Alto-based AI lab building a self-improving, superintelligent reasoner - starting with an AI mathematician. Its AxiomProver system invents new theorems, proves them formally in Lean, and verifies them before they reach a human, aiming to give AI the one thing language models lack: provable correctness. Founded in 2025 by mathematician Carina Hong, the company has raised $264M and claims machine-generated proofs accepted by peer-reviewed journals.
Reflection AI
Reflection AI is a New York-based artificial intelligence lab founded in 2024 by former Google DeepMind researchers Misha Laskin and Ioannis Antonoglou. It is building autonomous coding agents and open frontier language models, with the stated ambition of reaching superintelligence by first solving software engineering. Its flagship product, Asimov, is a code research and comprehension agent for large codebases. After raising $2 billion at an $8 billion valuation in October 2025, the company has positioned itself as an open, Western alternative to closed labs like OpenAI and Anthropic and to Chinese open-weight models like DeepSeek.
Imbue
Imbue is a San Francisco AI research lab building agents that can reason and code. Founded in 2021 as Generally Intelligent and renamed in 2023, the company is led by CEO Kanjun Qiu and CTO Josh Albrecht. After a $200M Series B that valued it above $1B, Imbue is focused on practical agent tools - most visibly Sculptor, a UI for running parallel coding agents safely in containers - guided by a mission to keep humans in control of powerful AI.
The Harris Poll
The Harris Poll is one of the longest-running public opinion and market research firms in the United States, tracking the sentiment, behaviors, and motivations of American adults since 1963. Now part of Stagwell (NASDAQ: STGW), it pairs decades of polling heritage with AI-powered research tools such as the Harris Quest suite, advising leaders, brands, and institutions on how to anticipate change and act with confidence.