Chris OlahChris Olah

Born around 1991 in Toronto. Graduated from The Abelard School (National AP Scholar, 2010). Dropped out of university at age 18 and received a Thiel Fellowship -- Peter Thiel's program paying young people $100K to skip college and build things. With no degree, gave a talk at Google that impressed Jeff Dean, who offered him an internship. Interned at Google Brain for 2 years, then stayed for 4 years total. Became known for his clear blog posts on neural network visualization (colah.github.io). Led the interpretability team at OpenAI. Co-founded Anthropic (2021) where he now leads interpretability research, producing work on mechanistic interpretability, mapping the internal features and circuits inside large language models. One of the most prominent self-taught researchers in AI.