More than seven years since Forbes launched its first AI 50 list, the artificial intelligence industry has exploded, growing more expansive and increasingly too crowded for a single list to capture. As venture capital firms continue to pour money into AI, a new tier of startups has emerged: younger, earlier-stage companies building fast and raising faster as they try to rival their more established peers. That’s why this year, for the first time, Forbes is introducing the AI 50 Brink List, spotlighting 20 of the most promising Seed and Series A-stage startups building in artificial intelligence. Read more: #ForbesAI50# Photos: Nectar Social, Resolve AI, Periodic Labs, Ashley Maxwell, Giga, Jim Vetter, Studio B Portraits, Axiom Sponsoring Partner @MayfieldFund

In February 1998, nearly twenty years after Lawrence Singleton attacked her, severed both her arms, and left her in a California ravine, Mary Vincent boarded a plane to Florida. No one required her to go. Singleton was being tried for another crime, in another state, against another woman. Mary volunteered. The woman’s name was Roxanne Hayes. She was thirty-one years old, a mother of three, living in Tampa. In February 1997, Singleton attacked and killed her inside his home. Neighbors heard her screaming and called police. Officers arrived while he was still there. The evidence was overwhelming. But Mary understood something the jury needed to know. This was not the first time. In 1978, Mary had been a fifteen-year-old hitchhiker when Singleton picked her up. He assaulted her, cut off both her arms with a hatchet, and threw her down a thirty-foot ravine, believing she would die. She did not. Mary packed mud around her wounds, climbed the ravine using her shoulders, and walked miles along a highway until someone found her. She gave police a description detailed enough to identify Singleton. He was convicted and received the maximum sentence allowed at the time. Fourteen years. He served fewer than nine. Psychiatric evaluations warned that he remained dangerous. He had even sent threatening letters while imprisoned. Still, the system released him. Years later, Roxanne Hayes was dead. By then, Mary was thirty-five and raising two sons. She had survived poverty, disability, and years of rebuilding a life around injuries that would have destroyed many people. She had also discovered art. Using prosthetic grips, she created bright portraits and sculptures, especially images of strong women. She was moving forward. Then she read about Roxanne. And she returned to the man she had every reason never to see again. Mary entered the Florida courtroom with prosthetic arms she had spent half her life learning to use. She pointed toward Singleton. Then she told the jury what he had done. Her testimony was brief. Precise. “He left me to die.” Those words carried nearly twenty years of survival. Mary was not there to relive her own suffering for attention. She was there to make sure Roxanne’s death was not treated as an isolated act committed by a man who had changed. She gave the jury the history the courtroom needed. Singleton was convicted in February 1998. Two months later, he was sentenced to death. He died of cancer on death row in 2001 before the sentence was carried out. Mary later said she had wanted one final chance to look him in the eyes. She never received it. But she accomplished what she had gone to Florida to do. She ensured that the man who had taken her arms and later taken another woman’s life would never walk free again. Mary Vincent’s story is usually told as a story of physical survival. The ravine. The impossible climb. The miles she walked while bleeding. But her courage did not end there. Twenty years later, she chose to walk back into the presence of the man who had tried to erase her. Not for revenge. For another woman. Mary later created a foundation to help survivors of violent crime. She became an artist, a speaker, and a mother. As a child, she once said she wanted to become a mother to the world. In that Florida courtroom, she showed exactly what that meant.

Portrait of "Sumaia" by Irish Activist/Artist Anne-Marrie Farrell. "I saw severed hands and legs all around me" - Sumaia Abu Ghaliba, aged 10 - GAZA Three of Sumaia's young cousins were murdered by the IDF and she was seriously injured by shrapnel which severed her hand and caused multiple injuries throughout her small body. Gaza is the most dangerous place in the world in which to be a child. Thousands upon thousands of children have become amputees since the genocide began. It now holds the "biggest cohort of paediatric amputees in the world" - Ghassan Abu-Sittah. The lives and dreams of an entire generation of Palestinians are being stolen, on our watch. Based on a photo and interview by @hani.aburezeq (ig)