Sam Altman Claims ChatGPT 4o Would Not Have Happened Without This Indian-Origin Tech Whiz: All You Need To Know

OpenAI unveiled the new ChatGPT 4o earlier this month which encapsulated everyone’s attention and drew comparisons with the ability of AI in the movie Her. Sam Altman, the guy heading OpenAI, pointed out publicly that ChatGPT 4o comes via the Omni team and he specifically mentioned the name of an Indian techie whiz, Prafulla Dhariwal, who Altman says, made the new version of ChatGPT happen.

Indian-origin techies have become a core part of the tech industry over the years, with the likes Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella showing the talent pool and the brilliance that helped them lead big tech giants.

Prafulla Dhariwal – The Man Who Made ChatGPT 4o Happen

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

His achievements didn’t stop there. Back in 2009, the Indian government awarded him the winner of the National Talent Search Scholarship and in the same period also won the gold models at the International Astronomy Olympiad in China.

Stepping Stone Into the World Of AI

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

Since then, Dhariwal has moved up the ranks and is now a core part of the OpenAI team where he operates as a research scientist. His best catalogue of work at OpenAI includes his work on the DALL-E 2 image generation tool and few more, along with the ChatGPT 4o. Dhariwal was a part of the Omni team that has been instrumental in the advancement of ChatGPT to the Omni level that we all got to see last Monday.

OpenAI and Google are going for the juggernaut with their respective AI ambitions but the latter seems happy to take things slow rather than push everything at the same time. We can’t wait to see what Prafulla and his team get to work and show us next.