Co-founders · Interpretability lead

Chris Olah

Left the University of Toronto after one year, without finishing a degree, and became one of the founders of interpretability research.

Forbes' real-time estimate, based on its own valuation of each co-founder's stake. Anthropic has not published founder holdings.

Career

Anthropic
- Cofounder, Interpretability Research LeadMar 2021 – present
OpenAI
- Member of Technical StaffSep 2018 – Dec 2020
Google Brain
- Research ScientistNov 2016 – Sep 2018
- Research AssociateOct 2015 – Nov 2016
X
Xelerance
- DeveloperJun 2011 – Sep 2011
Environment Canada
- Developer, Adaptations and Impacts Research DivisionJul 2010 – Nov 2010

University of Toronto (attended, studied mathematics for one year before dropping out, no degree)

Studied mathematics at Toronto for one year and has no degree.
Received a Thiel Fellowship in 2012.
Joined Google Brain as an intern in 2014; DeepDream (2015) is among his early work.
Co-founded Distill, an interactive machine learning journal, in 2017.
Published a denial-of-service vulnerability in the Unbound DNS resolver in 2011, logged as CVE-2011-1922.
Created the meta-SNE algorithm, which maps the space of neural networks, during a 2014 Google Brain internship hosted by Jeff Dean.
Started the journal Distill to reduce what he calls "research debt" by explaining existing results unusually clearly.
Spoke at the Vatican launch of Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical in May 2026, the only Big Tech representative invited.
Says his team keeps finding internal states in models that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief and unease.