We have already observed about the release of GPT-4o by OpenAI on May 13, 2024. Sam Altman, CEO two days later attributed this release to the efforts taken by Prafulla Dhariwala, a Pune resident who now works as a research scientist heading the Omni team at OpenAI.

Altman said GPT-4o would not have seen the light of the day, had it not been for the vision, talent, conviction and determination of Prafulla over a long period of time. It will be hailed as a revolution the way we use computers.

Omni team’s first contribution is GPT-4o. It is OpenAI’s first native multi-modal model. On X, Prafulla mentions that it was a huge organization-wide effort and was a result of hard work done by his team.

Prafulla joined OpenAI in 2016 as a research intern. He rose through the ranks to be a research scientist working on generative AI models and unsupervised learning. Prafulla won in 2009 the National Talent Search Scholarship (GOI). He won a gold medal at Astronomy Olympiad at China. He also won a gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad in 2012 and at Physics Olympiad in 2013.

His PCM score at 12th class was 295 out of 300. He excelled at entrance examinations. He scored 330 out of 360 at Jee-Mains. However, instead of IIT, he joined MIT. He took Bachelor’s in Computer Science at MIT in 2017 with a perfect GPA of 5.0/5.0.