Who is Prafulla Dhariwal? The Indian lauded by Sam Altman for GPT-4o

GPT-4o (with the o meaning 'omni'), the latest flagship model by OpenAI, with capabilities across text, voice, and vision is now live. Sam Altman, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the artificial intelligence (AI) startup, on Thursday lauded the mastermind behind the new AI model, who is an Indian.

Taking to X (formerly Twitter), Altman lauded OpenAI research scientist Prafulla Dhariwal and said that without his vision, talent, and determination, GPT-4o would not have been possible.

"GPT-4o would not have happened without the vision, talent, conviction, and determination of @prafdhar over a long period of time. that (along with the work of many others) led to what i hope will turn out to be a revolution in how we use computers," OpenAI CEO said.

Altman was replying to Dhariwal's tweet, where he gave a shout-out to people involved in the project. "GPT-4o (o for "omni") is the first model to come out of the omni team, OpenAI's first natively fully multimodal model. This launch was a huge org-wide effort, but I'd like to give a shout out to a few of my awesome team members who made this magical model even possible!," the Pune native had said.

Who is Prafulla Dhariwal?

Prafulla Dhariwal is a research scientist at OpenAI focusing on generative models and unsupervised learning. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Mathematics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with a GPA of 5.0/5.0.

In Class XII, he scored 295 out of 300 in the PCM (Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics) group. He even secured 330 out of 360 in the Joint Entrance Examination – Main (JEE-Main) and 190 in the Maharashtra Common Entrance Test (MHT CET).

Accomplishments

• National Talent Search Scholarship in 2009
• Gold medal at the International Astronomy Olympiad in China in 2009
• Gold medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad in 2012 and 2013
• Abasaheb Naravane memorial prize in 2013

He had joined OpenAI as a research intern in 2016 and advanced to become a research scientist.