US exceptionalism in AI has always been a myth

Kill the universities and it will evaporate entirely

A few weeks back a friend and I were pondering the never ending stream of news stories about how all the innovation in AI was “USA, USA, USA!”

(From memory, this was just after the first DeepSeek release that got a lot of public attention. As you will likely remember, the response was sadly much more ‘they cheated!’ than ‘cool work, let’s build on it’.)

And we wondered - how many of the most influential contributors to AI research in the last 20 years, were actually born in America? I’ll wait while you think about it, or you can just skip down to the list below.

Influential researchers in AI in the last twenty years

First we need some idea of who ‘influential’ is in the research world. I complied the list below by listing top-of-mind people I came up with as impactful and then asking Claude, DeepSeek and Chat GPT as well. A researcher made it into the list if at least three of those four sources listed them.

Birthplaces of influential researchers in AI

And now for the big reveal, where were they born?

Ah, gosh, right.

Where do they live and work today?

For many of these folk, where they live today will be a reasonable approximation of where they did much of their impactful research.

Well will you look at that!

What about the next twenty years then?

From the data above, it’s not exactly a stretch to say that standout talent in AI research can be born pretty much anywhere. And that an outsized share of it has been drawn into the US because of their absolutely top drawer, well funded and well supported universities.

With the current administration laying waste to all of that, it does make you wonder which country is going to step up to the plate and reap the benefits for the next half century or so.