san-francisco-ai-startup
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Deep Cogito
Deep Cogito is a San Francisco AI research company building open-source large language models with hybrid reasoning - the same model can answer instantly or stop to reason before responding. Founded in 2024 by former Google engineer Drishan Arora, the company trains its Cogito models with a method called Iterated Distillation and Amplification (IDA), which lets a model improve by learning from its own reasoning rather than from human labels. Its stated goal is general superintelligence, and its flagship 671B open model competes with the strongest open systems from DeepSeek and Meta.
Guide Labs
Guide Labs is a San Francisco AI research company building interpretable foundation models - large language and diffusion models that can reliably explain how they reach an answer, trace outputs back to their training data, and be steered without retraining. Founded in 2023 by machine-learning researcher Julius Adebayo and colleagues from the academic interpretability world, the company argues that the black-box status quo is a solvable engineering problem, not an unavoidable cost of scale. Its flagship open-source release, Steerling-8B, is pitched as the first large-scale inherently interpretable language model, and its Clarity platform packages interpretability tools for teams in regulated, high-stakes fields like lending, medicine, and drug discovery.