The vice president of ChatGPT-maker on July 3 inaugurated the Global INDIAai Summit 2024 in the capital city alongside ministers and MeitY officials. He spoke about how AI has added speed and dynamism to an already-vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystem in India
Srinivas Narayanan, VP of Applied at OpenAI
The auditorium in New Delhi’s Bharat Mandapam was buzzing on Wednesday with industry veterans, students, delegates of 15 member countries of the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI), and ministers from the central government. Leaders of global tech giants like Nvidia, AMD, Microsoft, Intel and AWS were also present. Among everyone, OpenAI’s Indian-origin vice president attracted the most attention, with attendees gathering around him for a selfie. Srinivas Narayanan inaugurated the Global INDIAai Summit 2024 alongside IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, the Government of Japan’s Hiroshi Yoshida, Union Minister of State for Electronics and IT Jitin Prasada, Nasscom President Debjani Ghosh, and MeitY officials.
Narayanan grew up in Chennai and first learnt about artificial intelligence (AI) in 1994. During his undergraduate days at IIT-Madras, he wrote his first AI chess program. “Unlike the chess kids from Chennai these days, my AI chess wasn't very good. So, I couldn't have imagined back then that 30 years later, I would be talking about AI at a prestigious forum like this,” he said, addressing the gathering.
In his role as the VP of Applied at OpenAI, Narayanan leads the teams responsible for OpenAI’s products, including ChatGPT, which is used by over 100 million people weekly, and the developer platform, which is used by 2 million developers. He recently completed a year with the startup. Prior to joining OpenAI, he spent 13 years at Meta (previously Facebook). He was a part of their hyper-growth period, holding key roles in engineering leadership. Narayanan has done his master’s in computer sciences (CS) at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and his bachelor’s in CS at IIT-Madras.
During his talk at the summit, Narayanan stressed on the importance of building artificial general intelligence that is safe and beneficial for all of humanity. He also spoke about how OpenAI leadership has been closely connected with India and keeping it in mind in the important decisions that they are making. Edited excerpts: