Sam Altman says ChatGPT 4o wouldn’t have happened without this Indian-born tech genius: everything you need to know

OpenAI unveiled the new ChatGPT 4o earlier this month, which caught everyone’s attention and drew comparisons to the AI ​​capability in the movie Her. Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, publicly pointed out that ChatGPT 4o came from the Omni team and he specifically mentioned the name of an Indian tech genius, Prafulla Dhariwal, who Altman said created the new version by ChatGPT.

Techies of Indian origin have become a vital part of the tech industry over the years, with the likes of Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella showing the talent pool and genius that has helped them lead major tech giants .

Prafulla Dhariwal – The man who created ChatGPT 4o

Dhariwal hails from the city of Pune and was able to lead OpenAI’s Omni team after getting all the credentials from his academic background. He scored 295 marks out of 300 after taking PCM group in class XII, which is never easy. He scored 190 marks in the Maharashtra Common Technical Entrance Test (MT-CET) and went on to secure 330 marks out of a possible 360 ​​in the Common Entrance Examination or JEE-Mains.

His achievements don’t stop there. In 2009, the Government of India awarded him the National Talent Scholarship and during the same period also won the Gold Models at the International Astronomy Olympiad in China.

Springboard to the world of AI

But Dhariwal’s break was yet to come and for that, he decided to pursue the Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science (with Mathematics) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or as everyone calls it, MIT. He graduated in 2017 with a 5.0 GPA and before he even got there, OpenAI made him a research intern in May 2016.

Since then, Dhariwal has risen through the ranks and is now an integral part of the OpenAI team where he operates as a research scientist. His best catalog of work at OpenAI includes his work on the image generation tool DALL-E 2 and a few others, as well as ChatGPT 4o. Dhariwal was part of the Omni team that was instrumental in advancing ChatGPT to the Omni level that we all got to see last Monday.

OpenAI and Google are aiming for the heavyweight with their respective AI ambitions, but the latter seems happy to slow things down rather than pushing everything at once. We can’t wait to see what Prafulla and his team get to work and show us next.