Indian-origin technology pioneer Uday Ruddaraju has been appointed as CTO, Compute of OpenAI.
OpenAI has promoted Indian-origin technology leader Uday Ruddaraju to the role of CTO of Computing, a year after Ruddaraju joined OpenAI after stepping down as head of infrastructure engineering at xAI.Ruddaraju declared, “My first 12 months at OpenAI have been incredibly rewarding. Our compute team has worked tirelessly to bring capacity online quickly and reliably, while doing the deep systems across compute, network, storage, and machine learning work needed to train leading models like GPT‑5.6. As we scale, the problems become more challenging, requiring pushing the boundaries and innovating across every layer (literally) of the stack.”“We are on a mission to build the world’s largest compute footprint so advanced AI can reach everyone and every workflow. We have a very exciting compute ramp and roadmap ahead. There is a lot to build across large-scale distributed systems, hardware, manufacturing, and data center construction spanning civil, mechanical, and electrical engineering,” his post said.
Bachelor’s degree from India
Uday Ruddaraju’s career has been in the headlines because he earned his bachelor’s degree from India and not from any IIT or NIT.
He studied computer science at Chaitanya Bharati Institute of Technology in Hyderabad. While still in college, he interned at Amazon Web Services. He then moved to the United States to pursue a master’s degree in computer science at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities.From 2013 to 2018, he worked at eBay, then joined Robinhood and then xAI. His resignation from xAI made headlines again because he was one of the top 5 poachers from XAI to OpenAI.“Thank you @elonmusk and everyone at xAI for this rare opportunity to help build something truly essential with Colossus. It has been an honor to be part of a mission this bold, and to see from the inside what sustained focus and execution really looks like. Reporting to Elon and learning directly from him has definitely been the best part of working at xAI,” Ruddaraju wrote in his farewell message. “Jensen Huang was right, Elon and his team are unique in what they can achieve.
“I am grateful to play a small role in shaping the future of computational AI from within,” his letter added.
