30 Indian Minds Leading the AI Revolution

OpenAI's Srinivas Narayanan: Driving innovation to reshape productivity and creativity

Narayanan heads OpenAI's engineering efforts, creating innovative multi-modal AI that is reshaping productivity, education, and creativity worldwide

By Naini Thaker Forbes India Staff

Published: Jun 23, 2025 02:20:24 PM IST

Updated: Jun 23, 2025 02:24:23 PM IST

Full Bio

Srinivas Narayanan, Vice president, engineering, OpenAI

When Srinivas Narayanan first wrote a chess-playing programme as an undergraduate at IIT-Madras in the early 1990s, he didn’t know he was laying the foundation for a career that would help shape the future of AI. While pursuing his BSc in computer science, Narayanan eagerly took every AI-related elective available. “I didn’t think of it as AI back then,” he recalls. “You just follow what interests you. But looking back, it’s clear I was always drawn to it.”

Today, as vice president of engineering at OpenAI, Narayanan leads engineering teams behind groundbreaking AI products like ChatGPT, developer APIs and enterprise tools—innovations that are transforming the way people work, learn and create. “AI is a fascinating mix of complex challenges, blending both science and engineering,” he says. “India is our second-largest market for ChatGPT and our fastest-growing,” he adds. “It’s among the top 10 countries for developers using our API. Making AI useful for India is deeply personal for me.”

From Meta to OpenAI

Narayanan spent over a decade at Meta, where he witnessed first-hand the rising tide of AI. “The field changed dramatically around 2012 with breakthroughs like ImageNet,” he says. “I saw how AI could impact products at scale, and I was sure the technology was going to have a largescale impact on the world.”

That desire led him to OpenAI, drawn by its mission to ensure artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity. “The canvas here is much broader,” he explains. “We’re building technologies like ChatGPT that touch education, health care, finance and more. That’s incredibly exciting.”

As OpenAI continues to push the boundaries of AI, Narayanan emphasises the importance of making models not just more powerful, but more contextually aware and responsive. “We want to make our models more intelligent. We want to make them smarter and react to new contexts in a quicker way,” he explains.

A major focus area is multi-modality—teaching models to understand and integrate diverse forms of input like audio and visual data. “We’ve made lots of good progress over the last year,” he notes. Alongside, personalisation is emerging as a key frontier. “We recently launched something called memory, so you can understand your life better. It can provide you with more tailored responses based on what you’ve talked about in the past,” Narayanan says. “These are interesting problems that we want to get better at.”

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Narayanan’s teams were also behind the viral success of ChatGPT and, more recently, OpenAI’s image generation tool. When they launched ImageGen a few months back, they didn’t expect it to go viral. “For a lot of my team members, in some way, it was a deja vu from launching ChatGPT,” he says. “The reception for ImageGen has been incredible. I have been in hyper-growth companies like Meta, but even with those, this was unlike anything I’ve seen in my life. So many of us were up for multiple nights dealing with this crazy growth.”

The platform got 700 million images a week, and 100 million people were trying it out. “It’s during moments like these that you realise the magic of what you’re building and how it’s reaching people. It feels incredibly special to be a part of that,” Narayanan says.

Also read: Predicting a future where it will be irresponsible to not use AI: Srikanth Velamakanni

Looking ahead

Among Narayanan’s many focus areas, one of his top priorities is driving down the cost of AI, making it more accessible and affordable. “Our product costs have come down over 100x in the last couple of years,” he says. “We’re optimising models, infrastructure and even working with chip manufacturers to make AI more accessible globally.”

Narayanan is excited about “agentic applications”—AI systems that can autonomously perform tasks like writing code or managing workflows. “We just launched Codex, which lets developers delegate software tasks to AI. It’s a transformative way of working.”

“What excites me most,” Narayanan says, “is how AI can be a force multiplier for human potential.” He believes that the next wave of AI innovation will not just be about smarter models, but also about deeper integration into everyday life.

“We’re already seeing AI assist with writing, coding, and research—but imagine what happens when it becomes a true collaborator across disciplines.”

He points to sectors like education and health care, where AI can help bridge gaps in access and quality. “In India, for instance, AI could help scale personalised tutoring or assist doctors in rural areas with diagnostics. That’s the kind of impact we’re aiming for.” Narayanan also emphasises the importance of collaboration across academia, industry and government to ensure AI is developed responsibly. “It’s not just about what we build, but how we build it—and who we build it for.”

But with power comes responsibility. “We think about safety holistically—bias, misinformation, frontier risks like persuasion or misuse. We have a preparedness framework and do extensive red teaming before launching models.”

For Narayanan, the next five to 10 years will be pivotal. “This is the most transformative technology we’ll experience in our lifetimes,” he says. “AI will change how we learn, how we cure diseases, how we understand the world. And I’m just grateful to be part of that journey.”

(This story appears in the 13 June, 2025 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)