Srinivas Narayanan joins OpenAI as VP of Engineering

Artificial intelligence research firm OpenAI has appointed Srinivas Narayanan as the vice president of engineer. Narayanan made the announcement through a LinkedIn post. “It is a historic and important time in AI. With a huge sense of excitement and responsibility, I am starting the next journey at OpenAI to advance AI and make it useful for all of humanity,” he wrote.

Before OpenAI, Narayanan was VP of engineering at Meta where he worked for 13 years between 2008 and 2021. He led the Applied Research team at Facebook AI and worked on areas like PyTorch, computer vision, speech, natural language, and personalisation. 

After his stint at Meta, Narayanan took a year off when he angel-invested in US and India-based startups, and helped venture capital firm General Catalyst with their AI investment strategy, Narayanan mentioned in the LinkedIn post. He has also worked with companies like IBM and Tavant Technologies, apart from founding Viralizr. He obtained his computer science engineering degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and a master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. OpenAI made another high-profile appointment in February with Andrej Karpathy joining the team. Karpathy was earlier the director of AI at Tesla.

After the launch of ChatGPT and GPT-4, OpenAI’s chief Sam Altman said that the company is working on GPT-4 from a safety perspective. Notably, ChatGPT has been banned in countries like Russia and China. Italy also placed a temporary ban on the AI tool citing privacy and issues pertaining to age restriction. The European Union last week created a task force on ChatGPT to foster cooperation and information exchange on possible enforcement actions conducted by data protection authorities.