SAE Research Resembles Older Papers

ninamiolane · x · 2026-07-15

The post revisits a discovery the author made two years ago: reading older papers by Bruno Olshausen's team, they found them strikingly similar to the superposition / SAE / interpretability research that has become popular in the Anthropic and MechInterp communities over the past couple of years.

Their initial reaction was: Are people missing citations?

But digging deeper, they realized this is actually a deeper historical lineage, not just a simple case of omitted references.

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