# Julius Adebayo

> Julius Adebayo is the co-founder and CEO of Guide Labs, a San Francisco startup building inherently interpretable foundation models. An MIT-trained computer scientist whose 2018 NeurIPS paper showed that popular deep-learning explanations were not reliable, Adebayo now leads a team shipping Steerling-8B, an open-source 8-billion parameter LLM whose every token can be traced back to its training data.

- **Role:** Co-Founder and CEO at Guide Labs
- **Organizations:** Guide Labs, MIT, Prescient Design / Genentech, Google Brain, Fast Forward Labs
- **Education:** BS, Mechanical Engineering, Brigham Young University, MS, Computer Science and Technology Policy, MIT, PhD, Computer Science (advised by Hal Abelson), MIT
- **Known for:** Co-founded Guide Labs, an interpretable AI company backed by Y Combinator, Initialized Capital, and Tectonic Ventures, Co-authored the widely-cited 2018 NeurIPS paper 'Sanity Checks for Saliency Maps' that reshaped the explainable-AI field, Released Steerling-8B, an open-source interpretable LLM whose outputs trace back to training data

## Career timeline

- **2017-2018** — Brain Resident, Google
- **2018** — Co-authored landmark NeurIPS paper showing saliency maps were unreliable
- **2018-2022** — PhD at MIT, advised by Hal Abelson, supported by Open Philanthropy
- **2022-2023** — Postdoctoral researcher at Prescient Design / Genentech
- **2023** — Co-founded Guide Labs with Aya Abdelsalam Ismail
- **2024** — Raised seed funding led by Initialized Capital
- **2026** — Open-sourced Steerling-8B, an interpretable 8B-parameter LLM

## Achievements

- Co-founded Guide Labs, an interpretable AI company backed by Y Combinator, Initialized Capital, and Tectonic Ventures
- Co-authored the widely-cited 2018 NeurIPS paper 'Sanity Checks for Saliency Maps' that reshaped the explainable-AI field
- Released Steerling-8B, an open-source interpretable LLM whose outputs trace back to training data
- Developed the first interpretable generative diffusion model
- Published 24+ research papers at top ML venues including NeurIPS, ICLR, and ICML
- Earned PhD in Computer Science from MIT under Hal Abelson

## Latest updates

- **2026-02** — Guide Labs debuted Steerling-8B, an interpretable LLM that traces every token to its training origins, covered by TechCrunch.

## Links

- Website: https://juliusadebayo.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/juliusadebayo
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/juliusadml
- GitHub: https://github.com/adebayoj
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Da5fBuLNWRA

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/julius-adebayo
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-06-30