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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 12, 2026

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His claim may well be self-serving or misleading or just wrong.

I looked into it further: Olah led OpenAI's interpretability team, Cammarata was a core member. However, even working on interpretability all the way back in 2020 is pretty significant. Almost nobody was doing this research back then. Cammarata coauthored papers on polysemanticity that he's now moving against. I nominate that these are more important and useful pieces of information than 'he likes doing LSD':

He was second author on OpenAI’s 2023 paper “Language models can explain neurons in language models,” with Steven Bills, Dan Mossing, Henk Tillman, Leo Gao, Gabriel Goh, Ilya Sutskever, Jan Leike, Jeff Wu, and William Saunders.

He was second author on that team’s founding paper. The Circuits thread began with “Zoom In: An Introduction to Circuits” by Olah, Nick Cammarata, Ludwig Schubert, Gabriel Goh, Michael Petrov, and Shan Carter on 10 March 2020.

He co-authored the OpenAI Distill article reverse-engineering CLIP, with Gabriel Goh, Chelsea Voss, Shan Carter, Michael Petrov, Ludwig Schubert, and Alec Radford. That’s “Multimodal Neurons,” which the essay references.