Meet the Young Indian Behind OpenAI’s GPT-4o Innovation

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

This isn’t just another lame pickup line. This is the way Prafulla Dhariwal presents himself on his webpage. Further to being more than simply a memorable opener, Dhariwal is the brains behind GPT-4o (the ‘o’ standing for Omni).

Dhariwal is the head of OpenAI’s Omni team, and GPT-4o is the group’s first attempt at creating genuinely multimodal models. At its Spring Update presentation earlier this week, OpenAI debuted GPT-4o, its newest flagship AI model, demonstrating its voice, text, and visual reasoning capacity.

However, the world was unaware of Pune-Native until OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently posted on X (previously Twitter).

“It would not have been possible for GPT-4o to occur without Prafulla Dhariwal’s long-term vision, talent, conviction, and determination. It resulted in what I hope will prove to be a revolution in the way we use computers, together with the work of many others,” Altman wrote in the post.

Who is Prafulla Dhariwal?

Dhariwal’s career has been marked by several noteworthy accomplishments.

The Government of India awarded him the National Talent Search Scholarship in 2009. He also took home the gold medal from the China International Astronomy Olympiad the same year. He took home gold in the International Mathematical Olympiad in 2012 and the International Physics Olympiad in 2013.

His exceptional achievement in Class XII is demonstrated by his outstanding score of 295 out of 300 in the physics, chemistry, and mathematics (PCM) group. Even in admission tests, he performed exceptionally well, scoring 190 in the Joint Admission Exam (JEE-Mains) and 330 out of 360 in the Maharashtra Technical Common Entrance Test (MT-CET).

In 2013, the Maharashtra State Board of Secondary and Higher Secondary Education (MSBSHSE) founded the annual Abasaheb Naravane Memorial Prize, which he was even given.

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“I studied all year long in class XII, concentrating especially on JEE preparation because I wanted to attend IIT. However, I am now overjoyed to have also been accepted to MIT,” Dhariwal said in a 2013 interview with the Mid-Day newspaper.

Dhariwal studied for his bachelor’s degree in computer science (math) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he earned a flawless 5.0/5.0 GPA in 2017.

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

Dhariwal worked briefly as an undergraduate researcher at the MIT Computer Visions Group and the Center for Brain, Mind, and Machines, as well as a quantitative analyst intern at the D.E. Shaw Group, before joining OpenAI.

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