"GPT-40 would not have happened without the vision, talent, conviction, and determination of Prafulla Dhariwal over a long period," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X, praising Dhariwal's efforts behind it.

Dhariwal hails from Pune, India. A child prodigy, he has been winning tech competitions since his early years. "When he was only one-and-a-half years old, we bought him a computer," his mother recalled in an old interview with AIM.

Prafulla was also featured in a Pogo ad called 'Amazing Kid Genius' and received a scholarship for a 10-day trip to NASA.

He received the prestigious Abasaheb Naravane Memorial Award for achieving the highest marks in physics, chemistry and maths back in school. He opted for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for further studies, thus joining OpenAl in 2017.

Prafulla has made significant contributions to advanced Al 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.

The unveiling of GPT-40 at OpenAl's Spring Update event showcased the model's advanced capabilities in reasoning across voice, text, and vision, setting a new standard in Al technology.

This marks OpenAl's first foray into natively multimodal models, a feat achieved under Dhariwal's leadership of the Omni team.