Meet the Child Prodigy from India Who Helped Build OpenAI's GPT-4o (2024)

OpenAI recently released GPT-4o at its latest Spring Update event, which won hearts with its ‘omni’ capabilities across text, vision, and audio. OpenAI’s demos, which included a real-time translator, a coding assistant, an AI tutor, a friendly companion, a poet, and a singer, soon became the talk of the town.

Register to learn more >

However, little did the world know that an Indian who was a child prodigy, Prafulla Dhariwal, was behind it until OpenAI chief Sam Altman posted about it on X.

“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,” posted OpenAI chief Sam Altman on X, praising Dhariwal’s efforts behind GPT-4o.

“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!” posted Dhariwal on X, highlighting the contributions of his team.

Who is Prafulla Dhariwal?

Dhariwal hails from Pune, India, and has always been a child prodigy, winning tech competitions since his early years. His parents recognised his natural talent at a very young age. “When he was only one-and-a-half years old, we bought a computer,” his mother recalled in an old interview.

She added that whenever Prafulla’s dad sent an email, he would sit next to him, eager to learn. At 11, he designed his first website.

His feats don’t end there. Prafulla also featured in a Pogo ad called ‘Amazing Kid Genius’ and received a scholarship for a 10-day trip to NASA.

In high school, he scored 295 out of 300 in the physics-chemistry-mathematics (PCM) group in his Class XII exams and achieved a score of 190 in the Maharashtra Technical Common Entrance Test (MT-CET). Additionally, he scored 330 out of 360 in the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE-Mains).

Prafulla received the prestigious Abasaheb Naravane Memorial Award for achieving the highest marks in PCM. He also represented India in international Olympiads, including the International Astronomy Olympiad in China and the International Mathematics Olympiad in Argentina.

After completing high school, Dhariwal chose to pursue his undergraduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) instead of IIT. He studied there from 2013 to 2017, majoring in computer science and mathematics.

When asked if it was a tough choice to make between IIT and MIT, he said, “Absolutely! Both institutes are the best. 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,” said Dhariwal in an old interview.

The Journey So Far

After completing his undergraduate degree, Dhariwal joined OpenAI in 2017 as a research scientist, focusing on generative models and unsupervised learning.

Dhariwal has also worked on the Jukebox project, a generative model for music that can create high-fidelity and diverse songs with coherence for several minutes. This model uses a multi-scale VQ-VAE to compress raw audio into discrete codes, which are then modeled using autoregressive Transformers.

Building on his expertise in generative models, Dhariwal has also contributed to the development of diffusion models that outperform GANs in image synthesis. These diffusion models achieve superior image sample quality and can be used for both unconditional and conditional image synthesis, further showcasing his impact on the field of AI.

Moreover, he has made significant contributions to advanced AI models, such as Glow for generating high-resolution images quickly, the Variational Lossy Auto-encoder to prevent issues in autoencoders, PPO (Proximal Policy Optimisation) for reinforcement learning, and GamePad for applying reinforcement learning to formal theorem proving.

With OpenAI’s model now capable of engaging in natural, real-time voice conversations, the next pitstop for OpenAI appears to be music generation, and undoubtedly, Dhariwal will be at the center of it all.

Access all our open Survey & Awards Nomination forms in one place