OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently credited Pune native Prafulla Dhariwal for his pivotal role in the creation of ChatGPT 4o, a new AI model that has generated widespread acclaim since its launch. Altman took to X, formerly known as Twitter, to praise Dhariwal’s vision, talent, conviction, and determination, which he cited as essential to the development of GPT-4o.
In his post, Altman stated, “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.” This acknowledgment came in response to Dhariwal’s own post on X, where he discussed the innovative new model.
Dhariwal, who has been a key player at OpenAI, highlighted the collaborative effort behind GPT-4o, noting, “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!”
Prafulla Dhariwal’s journey from Pune to becoming a prominent figure at OpenAI is marked by a series of academic and professional achievements. A prodigious talent from a young age, Dhariwal has consistently excelled in his academic pursuits. He won the National Talent Search Scholarship from the Government of India and a gold medal at the International Astronomy Olympiad in China in 2009. His accolades also include gold medals in the International Mathematical Olympiad and the International Physics Olympiad.
Dhariwal attended Dr. Kalmadi Shyamrao High School in Pune, where he graduated in 2011. He scored an impressive 330 out of 360 in the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE-Mains) and achieved a near-perfect score of 295 out of 300 in the physics-chemistry-mathematics (PCM) group in his class XII exams. He pursued his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science (Mathematics) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), graduating in 2017 with a perfect GPA of 5.0/5.0.
Dhariwal’s professional journey is as distinguished as his academic one. He initially worked with Pinterest as a software engineer and served as a quantitative analyst intern at the D.E. Shaw Group. His association with OpenAI began in 2016 as a research intern. Today, he is a Research Scientist at the AI startup, having contributed to the development of GPT-3, the text-to-image platform DALL-E 2, the music generator Jukebox, and the reversible generative model Glow.
