'GPT-4o wouldn’t have happened without you': Sam Altman hails Pune boy

Prafulla Dhariwal's life timeline is nothing short of fiction.

This Pune guy was just a research intern at OpenAI in 2016. And today, Sam Altman is calling his name out to the world for his world-changing work.

Earlier this week, OpenAI unveiled its latest flagship AI model GPT-4o that can reason across voice, text, and vision.

Dhariwal led the team that made it possible.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed his identity to the world for the first time.

“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,” Altman wrote on X.

Who is Prafulla Dhariwal?

Pune native Dhariwal has been precocious since his childhood days. In 2009, he won the National Talent Search Scholarship and a gold medal at the International Astronomy Olympiad in China. 

In 2012 and 2013, he earned gold medals at the International Mathematical and Physics Olympiads.

In Class XII, he scored 295 out of 300 studying Science.

Altman’s guy scored 190 in Maharashtra’s Common Entrance Test and 330 out of 360 in the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE-Mains). 

In 2013, Dhariwal won the Abasaheb Naravane Memorial Prize.

The same year, while preparing for his IIT exam, he got selected at MIT where he studied computer science and mathematics.

He graduated in 2017 with a perfect 5/5 GPA.

In 2016, he landed a research intern role at Sam Altman’s OpenAI and became a research scientist.

He worked on projects like GPT-3, DALL-E 2, Jukebox, and Glow.