Pune native Prafulla Dhariwal has been credited as the brain behind OpenAI’s latest innovation, GPT-4o — a groundbreaking model marking OpenAI’s first fully multimodal AI.
Dhariwal, a research scientist who heads the Omni team at OpenAI, led the creation of GPT-4o. This model integrates text, voice, and vision into a single entity, enabling it to process and respond to various data types simultaneously.
Unveiled at the Spring Update event, GPT-4o can understand audio, images, and text at the same speed and generate responses in these formats.
“GPT-4o (o for ‘omni’) is the first model to come out of the omni team, OpenAI’s first 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 (sic),” Dhariwal wrote on X (formerly Twitter) on May 15.
OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, acknowledged Dhariwal’s role in developing GPT-4o. "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," he wrote.
Who is Prafulla Dhariwal?
"I’m a research scientist at OpenAI working on generative models and unsupervised learning. Previously, I was an undergrad at MIT studying computers, math, and physics. I’m from Pune and currently live in San Francisco. My name sounds like truffle, but with a P" - this is how Dhariwal introduces himself on his website. According to his X bio, he is also the co-creator of GPT-3, DALL-E 2, Jukebox, and Glow.
Dhariwal’s journey is marked by several achievements. In 2009, he won the National Talent Search Scholarship from the Government of India and a gold medal at the International Astronomy Olympiad in China. In 2012, he won gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad. He followed it up with another gold medal at the International Physics Olympiad in 2013.
In his Class XII exams, Dhariwal scored 295 marks in physics, chemistry, and mathematics. He then achieved a score of 190 in the Maharashtra Technical Common Entrance Test (MT-CET) and 330 out of 360 in the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE-Mains). He pursued a 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 journey with OpenAI began in May 2016 as a research intern, and he has since advanced to the position of research scientist.
