The article is vague about the companies in the paper, for some reason.

In the paper, OpenAI is at the top of the chart for cumulative citations. MEGVII, Hugging Face, Waymo, Momenta, Preferred Netowkrs, Anthropic, Owkin, and Databricks, and Aibee follow (in that order). Yes, that is citations, not publications, but they explain that they're trying to use that as a proxy for significance, albeit an imperfect one.

Companies like Google aren't included because they aren't unicorn startups.

databricks is a top ai startup?. i thought they did spark hosting or something.

what makes them a top ai startup