Former OpenAI researcher Shyamal Hitesh Anadkat has relocated back to India after nearly four years in Silicon Valley, where he worked at OpenAI and led the Applied Evals team responsible for evaluating and improving the performance, safety, and reliability of advanced AI systems. According to his post on X, Anadkat moved from the Bay Area to India earlier this year, stepping away from the intense global AI talent competition in the United States. He wrote that he still believes deeply in ensuring true superintelligence accelerates science and remains accessible and beneficial to all, while having grown up in India, he's always felt deeply connected to the ecosystem here.
Anadkat is now planning to build a frontier artificial intelligence venture in India, with a focus on what he describes as 'superintelligence' systems designed to accelerate scientific discovery while remaining broadly beneficial and accessible. He emphasised that his goal is not just incremental progress in AI, but the development of highly advanced systems capable of transforming research and knowledge production. His decision followed extensive conversations with researchers and engineers across India and the Asia-Pacific region, acknowledging that India already has strong technical talent but arguing that the ecosystem still lacks sufficient confidence and ambition to build globally dominant AI institutions.
Anadkat noted that returning from Silicon Valley felt 'counterintuitive' at first, but his perspective changed after engaging with the local AI community and reassessing the opportunity landscape. He described India's current moment in AI as a 'once-in-a-generation opportunity' and highlighted that what's been missing is the belief that you can build institutions of global consequence from anywhere, and more importantly, the ambition and the will to pursue ideas that seem impossibly large at first. His return comes amid a broader global reshuffling in the AI industry, where firms are competing heavily for research talent, and India is increasingly being recognised both as a major source of AI engineers and a growing base for AI development initiatives.
