AI Researcher

Chris Olah Portfolio

Co-founder of Anthropic, where he leads interpretability research; his blog and the "Circuits" paper series present original findings on reverse-engineering what individual neurons and features compute inside trained networks, built on a decade-long archive going back to posts like "Understanding LSTM Networks."

InterpretabilityNeural NetworksCircuitsAI Safety

What makes it work

A breakdown of the choices that make this portfolio stand out.

1

Original research, not secondhand explanation

The Circuits series doesn't summarize other people's papers — it publishes original findings about which internal features and circuits deep networks compute, the kind of ground-up empirical work that defines actual research rather than research communication.

2

Diagrams built to carry the technical argument

Custom visualizations of activation space and feature interactions are not decoration — they are the proof itself, since interpretability claims are hard to state convincingly in words alone.

3

A research agenda visible across a decade of posts

Read start to finish, the archive traces one throughline — from "Neural Networks, Manifolds, and Topology" (2014) to circuits and transformer interpretability — showing a sustained research program, not scattered topical posts.

What AI Researchers can take from this

Specific, actionable tips to apply to your own portfolio — no generic advice.

  • Publish original findings, not just summaries of others' papers — a genuine research contribution is what separates a researcher's site from a technical-writing site.

  • When a claim is hard to state in words, build a custom diagram that carries the argument instead of describing it in prose.

  • Let your archive read as a single throughline over years, not a set of disconnected topics — it shows a sustained research agenda.

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