Meet Pune’s Prafulla Dhariwal, the child prodigy behind OpenAI’s GPT-4o

“My name sounds like truffle, but with a P.”

No, this isn’t some cheesy pickup line. It’s how Prafulla Dhariwal introduces himself on his website. And he’s more than just a catchy introduction — Dhariwal is the mastermind behind the creation of GPT-4o (with the ‘o’ standing for Omni).

Dhariwal leads the Omni team at OpenAI, and GPT-4o marks their first foray into natively multimodal models. Earlier this week, OpenAI unveiled its latest flagship AI model GPT-4o at its Spring Update event, showcasing its ability to reason across voice, text, and vision.

But until OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s recent post on X (formerly Twitter), the world knew little about this Pune native.

“GPT-4o would not have happened without the vision, talent, conviction, and determination of Prafulla Dhariwal 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,” Altman said in the post.

Who is Prafulla Dhariwal?

Dhariwal’s journey has been marked by a string of remarkable accomplishments.

In 2009, he won the National Talent Search Scholarship from the Government of India. The same year, he also won the gold medal at the International Astronomy Olympiad in China. In 2012 and 2013, he won gold medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad and the International Physics Olympiad, respectively.

His Class XII performance was nothing short of stellar, evidenced by his remarkable score of 295 out of 300 in the physics-chemistry-mathematics (PCM) group. He even excelled in entrance exams, securing 190 in the Maharashtra Technical Common Entrance Test (MT-CET) and 330 out of 360 in the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE-Mains).

He was even awarded the annual Abasaheb Naravane memorial prize in 2013, instituted by the Maharashtra State Board of Secondary and Higher Secondary Education (MSBSHSE).

“In class XII I studied throughout the year and my special focus was on JEE preparations as I wanted to study in IIT. But now, I am more than happy that I have also been selected in MIT,” Dhariwal had told the Mid-Day newspaper in 2013.

Dhariwal pursued his Bachelor’s in Computer Science (Mathematics) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), graduating in 2017 with a perfect GPA of 5.0/5.0.

Dhariwal joined OpenAI in May 2016 as a research intern and grew up the ranks as a research scientist at the company working on generative models and unsupervised learning. He is one of the co-creators of GPT-3, text-to-image platform DALL-E 2, music generator Jukebox, and reversible generative model Glow.

Prior to joining OpenAI, Dhariwal had short stints as a software engineering intern at Pinterest, a quantitative analyst intern at the D.E. Shaw Group, and as an undergraduate researcher at both the Centre for Brain, Mind and Machines, and the Computer Visions Group at MIT.