Who Is Uday Ruddarraju? Indian-Origin xAI Engineer Joins OpenAI, Reveals What It’s Like To Work With Elon Musk

Uday Ruddarraju, an Indian-origin leader in infrastructure engineering, has resigned from Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, to join OpenAI. During his tenure of over a year at xAI, Ruddarraju played a crucial role in building Colossus, a colossal supercomputer housing more than 200,000 GPUs, and was instrumental in training Grok 3, one of xAI’s most advanced AI models.

Uday Ruddarraju Thanks Elon Musk, xAI

On July 8, Ruddarraju shared his thoughts on social media platform X (formerly Twitter), praising both Elon Musk and his team’s capabilities.

“Jensen Huang (Nvidia CEO) was right, Elon and his teams are singular in what they can achieve. Grateful to have played a small part in shaping the future of AI Compute from the inside,” he wrote.

He expressed deep appreciation for the opportunity to contribute to xAI’s ambitious infrastructure projects:

“Thank you @elonmusk and everyone at xAI for the rare opportunity to help build something truly foundational with Colossus. It was a privilege to be part of a mission this bold, and to see from the inside what relentless focus and execution really look like.”

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Uday Ruddarraju On Working With Elon Musk

Ruddarraju also highlighted the personal experience of working closely with Musk, “reporting into Elon and learning directly from him was definitely the best part about working at xAI.”

Shortly after departing xAI, Ruddarraju was announced as one of four notable new hires at OpenAI. The announcement was made internally by OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman via Slack, and later made public.

Responding to the news, Ruddarraju wrote, “excited to join you, Greg Brockman!”

Joining him at OpenAI are, David Lau, former senior software leader at Tesla, Mike Dalton, previously with xAI and Robinhood and Angela Fan, AI researcher formerly at Meta.

Both Ruddarraju and Mike Dalton are expected to contribute to Stargate, OpenAI’s ambitious infrastructure initiative designed to support the next generation of AI systems.

Speaking to Wired magazine, Ruddarraju described the project as, “a high-stakes infrastructure challenge that aligns well with the kind of ambitious work” he enjoys.

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