Ex-OpenAI researcher returns to India to build superintelligence, calls it a 'once in a generation opportunity'

An OpenAI researcher has moved from the Bay Area to India after nearly four years at the company. He said the shift no longer feels counterintuitive and could reflect a once-in-a-generation opening for India's AI ecosystem.

In Short

• Ex-OpenAI researcher leaves the US and moves back to India
• He says India can build AI institutions with global impact
• The move comes amid an intense AI talent war in the US

The battle for artificial intelligence talent has never been fiercer. Over the past few months, some of the world's biggest AI companies have been aggressively hiring top researchers and executives, often spending billions of dollars or offering lucrative compensation packages to attract the best minds. But amid this intense talent war in the US, one AI researcher at OpenAI has made a very different choice — he has left Silicon Valley and moved back to India. And he believes the country's biggest AI breakthroughs may still lie ahead.

AI companies are racing to hire the brightest minds

The race for talent has accelerated in recent months. OpenAI recently hired a top AI researcher from Google, whom the search giant had reportedly paid more than $2 billion to bring back just two years ago. The ChatGPT maker also announced that AI scholar Dean Ball, who played a crucial role in shaping early AI policy for the Trump administration, would join the company to lead its AI policy efforts.

Anthropic, meanwhile, has poached Google DeepMind's Nobel Prize winner John Jumper. Jumper announced that he would leave DeepMind to join Anthropic. He led DeepMind's AlphaFold project, which predicted the shape of all 200 million proteins known to science.

'Moving back felt like the counterintuitive choice'

While companies in the US continue hunting for top talent, an AI researcher at OpenAI recently announced that he had moved back to India earlier this year. In a post on X, he said he still believes deeply in ensuring that true superintelligence accelerates science and remains accessible and beneficial to everyone.

"After close to four years at @OpenAI, I moved from the Bay Area to India earlier this year," he wrote.

"I still believe deeply in ensuring true superintelligence accelerates science and remains accessible and beneficial to all. Having grown up here, I've also always felt deeply connected to the ecosystem here."

The researcher, who goes by Shyamal on X, added that over the past few weeks, he had spoken with researchers, engineers and thinkers across India and the Asia-Pacific region.

"It's become clear that there are many who want to build the future from here," he wrote.

"Moving back felt like the counterintuitive choice. I no longer think that's true."

A 'once-in-a-generation opportunity'

The researcher said what has been missing in India is the belief that globally significant institutions can be built from anywhere.

"What's been missing is the belief that you can build institutions of global consequence from anywhere," he wrote.

"And more importantly, the ambition and the will to pursue ideas that seem impossibly large at first."

He added, "This may be a once in a generation opportunity."

The post ended with a teaser: "More to come soon. DMs open if this resonates."

India is trying to catch up in AI

India's AI ecosystem has grown rapidly in recent years, but the country's output of homegrown AI models remains slower than that of the US, Europe and China. Only a handful of startups are releasing AI models, and most of them are focused on large language models or voice-based systems.

To encourage more development, the government launched the India AI Mission, a roughly $1.2 billion initiative. The programme gives selected startups access to subsidised GPU computing resources in exchange for releasing their AI models publicly.

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