Shyamal Anadkat has revealed that earlier this year, he quit his job at OpenAI and moved back to India. Anadkat led the Applied Evals team at OpenAI, where he spent the last four years working out of their San Francisco Bay Area office.
The Indian-origin former OpenAI employee said he no longer believed that moving away from Silicon Valley was a disadvantage, as he shared his thoughts on building the future of artificial intelligence from India.
Why he moved back
“After close to four years at OpenAI, I moved from the Bay Area to India earlier this year,” Anadkat announced in his X post last night. “I still believe deeply in ensuring true superintelligence accelerates science and remains accessible and beneficial to all.”
For the ex-OpenAI researcher, part of the reason for moving back to India was that he felt connected to the country’s ecosystem.
“Having grown up here, I've also always felt deeply connected to the ecosystem here,” he wrote.
(Also read: Indian techie who left OpenAI to join Meta reveals how to get hired at top AI company)
{{/usCountry}}(Also read: Indian techie who left OpenAI to join Meta reveals how to get hired at top AI company)
{{/usCountry}}After returning, Shyamal Anadkat spent several weeks speaking with researchers, engineers and thinkers across India and the Asia-Pacific region.
“Over the past several weeks, I've been speaking with researchers, engineers, and thinkers across India and APAC. It's become clear that there are many who want to build the future from here,” he said.
What India lacks
Anadkat acknowledged that some may view returning to India as an unusual decision, but his perspective has changed. The conversations he had with researchers and thinkers across the country convinced him that there are “many who want to build the future from here.”
“Moving back felt like the counterintuitive choice. I no longer think that's true,” he wrote.
The former OpenAI researcher said the biggest gap was not talent or opportunity, but the belief that world-changing organisations could be built from anywhere in the world. In India, what is missing is the confidence to build world-class institutions.
“What's been missing is the belief that you can build institutions of global consequence from anywhere,” Anadkat said. “And more importantly, the ambition and the will to pursue ideas that seem impossibly large at first. This may be a once in a generation opportunity,” he added.
How the internet reacted
The comments section of the X post was filled with congratulatory as well as curiosity-driven reactions.
“Great to hear this. What do you plan to create and start in India?” asked one X user.
“Shyamal has left OpenAI and is in Bengaluru right now, aiming for one of the hardest and most ambitious problems in science and research. If you're an AI researcher who wants to work on insanely hard problems, you should definitely reach out to Shyamal,” added Archie Sengupta, an AI researcher.
Anindyadeep, the co-founder of LiteFold, wrote: “Interacting with @shyamalanadkat and so many other founders and researchers recently made me realize that India is starting out. But it’s an amazing start and I have very high hopes and confidence that we can become the frontier. If you are someone who is looking for working on some extraordinarily hard problems and being the first ones, join him.”