Meet Prafulla Dhariwal, the Indian American Prodigy Behind GPT-4o, OpenAI’s Latest Innovation
- The Pune-born computer scientist is one of the co-creators of GPT-3, text-to-image platform DALL-E 2, music generator Jukebox, and reversible generative model Glow.
Indian computer scientist Prafulla Dhariwal has been making headlines as the leading force behind GPT-4o, OpenAI’s latest innovation. Co-creator of GPT-3, he leads the Omni team at OpenAI, Earlier this week, OpenAI unveiled its latest flagship AI model at its Spring Update event, “showcasing its ability to reason across voice, text, and vision,” according to the company website.
The San Francisco-based Dhariwal has received praise from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. “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 in a May 16 post on X.
Described by Indian media as a “prodigy,” the Pune native won the National Talent Search Scholarship from the Government of India in 2009, according to The Mint. The same year, he also won a gold medal at the International Astronomy Olympiad in China. This was followed by gold medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad and the International Physics Olympiad in 2012 and 2013, respectively.
In a 2014 interview with the BBC, Dhariwal’s mother said they bought a computer when her son was just one-and-a-half years old. She recalled how he would sit with his father, and was eager to learn about emails and the internet. He designed his first website at age 11.
He was also featured in a Pogo ad called “Amazing Kid Genius” and received a scholarship for a 10-day trip to NASA, according to a report in Analytics India Magazine.
A student of P Jog Junior College in Pune, he was awarded the Abasaheb Naravane Memorial Prize in 2013 for scoring 295 marks in physics, chemistry, and mathematics (PCM) in Grade 12, according to a report in the Indian Express. “The annual award is instituted by the Maharashtra State Board of Secondary and Higher Secondary Education (MSBSHSE) to honor meritorious students.,” the report added. He scored 190 in the Maharashtra Technical Common Entrance Test (MT-CET), and scored 330 out of 360 in the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE-Mains), an entrance assessment conducted for admission to various engineering colleges in India.
After his 12th grade, Dhariwal told Mid-Day that it was tough to decide between IIT and MIT. “Absolutely! Both institutes are the best,” he said. “Fortunately, MIT is providing me a scholarship that includes both tuition fees and residential facilities. That’s why I have decided to go to MIT.”
He 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.
Before joining OpenAI, he had short stints as a software engineering intern at Pinterest, a quantitative analyst intern at the D.E. Shaw Group, and an undergraduate researcher at both the Centre for Brain, Mind and Machines and the Computer Visions Group at MIT.