Latest news with #UdayRuddarraju
India.com
13-07-2025
- Business
- India.com
Meet Uday Ruddarraju, Indian-origin engineer who left Elon Musk's xAI to join…, he studied from …
Meet Uday Ruddarraju, Indian-origin engineer who left Elon Musk's xAI to join…, he studied from … Uday Ruddarraju: Indian-origin Uday Ruddarraju was serving as a chief of infrastructure engineering at xAI, which is world's richest man Elon Musk's Artificial Intelligence based startup. At xAI, Ruddarraju headed the team that is responsible for building the supercomputer Colossus with over 250,000 GPUs. Colossus is one of the largest system ever built. He also spearheaded the training of Grok 3, the company's newest AI model, utilising a largest pre-training process involving 100,000 GPUs. Now, has resigned from his responsibilities. What will he do next? Lets know.
NDTV
13-07-2025
- Business
- NDTV
"Elon, His Teams Are...": Indian-Origin Techie Quits xAI To Join OpenAI
The Indian-origin head of infrastructure engineering at Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company xAI has resigned to join OpenAI. Uday Ruddarraju, who spent over a year at xAI, was instrumental in building Colossus, a massive supercomputer consisting of more than 200,000 GPUs, and in training Grok 3, one of the company's most advanced AI models. "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 on X on Tuesday, July 8. After an unforgettable ride, I've decided to move on from @xai and yesterday was my last day. When I first joined, I thought everyone was absolutely nuts for thinking we could deploy 100K GPUs in 4 months, especially without a fully functioning site. Watching us go and double… — Uday Ruddarraju (@udayruddarraju) July 8, 2025 Uday Ruddarraju expressed gratitude to Elon Musk and the xAI team for the opportunity to contribute to their ambitious infrastructure goals. "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," he wrote. "Reporting into Elon and learning directly from him was definitely the best part about working at xAI," he added. Shortly after leaving xAI, Mr Ruddarraju was named among four high-profile hires at OpenAI. The move was announced by OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman in an internal Slack message and later shared publicly. "Excited to join you, Greg Brockman!" he wrote, reposting the announcement. Joining Mr Ruddarraju at OpenAI are David Lau, former senior software leader at Tesla; Mike Dalton, who previously worked at xAI and Robinhood; and Angela Fan, an AI researcher from Meta. The new hires bring deep experience in large-scale computing and AI infrastructure. Both Mr Ruddarraju and Dalton are expected to contribute to Stargate, OpenAI's ambitious infrastructure project aimed at powering the next generation of AI systems. Speaking to Wired, Mr Ruddarraju described Stargate as "a high-stakes infrastructure challenge that aligns well with the kind of ambitious work" he enjoys.
Hans India
13-07-2025
- Business
- Hans India
Top engineer quits Musk's AI firm: Joins OpenAI
Washington: Uday Ruddarraju, head of infrastructure engineering at Elon Musk's AI company xAI has resigned from his position. Ruddarraju, who was with the company for just over a year, played a key role in building Colossus — a large-scale supercomputer with over 200,000 GPUs — and in training Grok 3, one of xAI's latest AI models. In a post on X, Ruddarraju confirmed his exit from the company. In the post, he said 'Jensen Huang 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.' Reflecting on his time at xAI, he wrote in the post: 'After an unforgettable ride, I've decided to move on from @xai. When I first joined, I thought everyone was absolutely nuts for thinking we could deploy 100K GPUs in 4 months, especially without a fully functioning site. Watching us go and double that, and most importantly successfully train Grok 3 made me incredibly proud... and very happy to be wrong.'
Time of India
12-07-2025
- Business
- Time of India
Uday Ruddarraju joins Sam Altman's OpenAI after quitting Elon Musk's xAI: Tracing the career path of a supercomputing architect
Uday Ruddarraju joins Open AI after quitting xAI (image: X/@udayruddarraju) If you've never heard of Uday Ruddarraju, don't worry—you're not alone. He's not the guy giving TED Talks. He doesn't flood LinkedIn with motivational threads. But in the background of the biggest AI races on earth, he's the one writing the rules of scale. Last week, Uday exited Elon Musk 's xAI—where he was Head of Infrastructure Engineering—and quietly joined Sam Altman 's OpenAI , the force behind ChatGPT. This wasn't just a job switch. It was a heavyweight move in the escalating arms race of AI infrastructure. But the real story? It's Uday's career itself—one of sharp pivots, hard skills, and quiet influence in rooms that run the world's most powerful machines. From Minneapolis classrooms to 'Mission Critical Code' Uday is an alumnus of the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities, a public research university known for engineering depth over flash. He didn't graduate from an Ivy League or headline-grabbing tech institute. He went through the Midwestern grind and came out with core systems knowledge, the kind that's easy to overlook—but impossible to replace. Amazon: Lessons in scale One of Uday's earliest stints was at Amazon, where he worked on the infrastructure backbone that supports the world's largest cloud ecosystem—Amazon Web Services (AWS). Here, he focussed on building and scaling service infrastructure across distributed systems. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Fastest Selling Plots of Mysore from 40L | 40+ Amenities PurpleBrick Learn More Undo His team ensured that services met demanding latency benchmarks while remaining resilient to traffic surges. Key deliverables included: Developing scalable data ingestion pipelines for real-time analytics. Creating load-balancing modules that reduced latency across multiple data centres. Implementing auto-scaling frameworks that could react in milliseconds to surges in user requests. eBay: Modernising legacy giants After Amazon, Uday moved to eBay, where the challenge was different: Legacy systems. Uday was part of eBay's core site reliability and infrastructure engineering team, working on systems that handled billions of dollars in annual trade—but were often tied down by legacy code. While Amazon taught him how to build big, eBay taught him how to fix big. Robinhood: The fintech fast lane At Robinhood, Uday stepped into a world where milliseconds matter. Every glitch has real-world monetary impact. As Engineering Manager for Platform and Infrastructure, he helped Robinhood scale its backend to serve a rapidly expanding user base, especially during pandemic-era trading surges. Robinhood gave Uday something new—speed—not just in code execution, but in strategic decisions under fire. xAI and Colossus: The quiet giant In 2023, Uday joined xAI, Elon Musk's stealthy new AI venture with a not-so-stealthy ambition: To outdo OpenAI. At xAI, Uday led the team that built Colossus, one of the most powerful AI training supercomputers ever constructed. It was built to power Grok 3, xAI's answer to ChatGPT. In simple terms, Uday made sure the most powerful compute cluster in Musk's arsenal didn't just work—it flew. When he left xAI, Uday posted on X, 'Jensen Huang was right—Elon and his teams are singular in what they can achieve.' The OpenAI switch Now, Uday has switched camps. From the underdog building a rival chatbot, he's joined the titan. OpenAI isn't just building models—it's running products at global scale: ChatGPT, DALL·E, Codex, Whisper, and an API suite with enterprise-grade demand. While his exact role at OpenAI hasn't been disclosed, one thing is clear—he'll be scaling the engines behind the magic, not chasing the spotlight. TOI Education is on WhatsApp now. Follow us here . Ready to navigate global policies? Secure your overseas future. Get expert guidance now!
WIRED
08-07-2025
- Business
- WIRED
OpenAI Poaches 4 High-Ranking Engineers From Tesla, xAI, and Meta
OpenAI has hired four high-profile engineers away from rivals, including David Lau, former vice president of software engineering at Tesla, to join the company's scaling team, WIRED has learned. The news came via an internal Slack message sent by OpenAI cofounder Greg Brockman on Tuesday. Lau is joined by Uday Ruddarraju, the former head of infrastructure engineering at xAI and X, Mike Dalton, an infrastructure engineer from xAI, and Angela Fan, an AI researcher from Meta. Both Dalton and Ruddarraju also previously worked at Robinhood. At xAI, Ruddarraju worked on building Colossus, a massive supercomputer comprising more than 200,000 GPUs. OpenAI's scaling team manages the backend hardware and software systems and data centers, including Stargate—a new joint venture dedicated to building AI infrastructure—that allow its researchers to train cutting-edge foundation models. The work, though less buzzy than external-facing products like ChatGPT, is critical to OpenAI's mission of achieving artificial general intelligence—and staying ahead of its rivals. 'Infrastructure is where research meets reality, and OpenAI has already demonstrated this successfully,' Ruddarraju said in a statement to WIRED. 'Stargate, in particular, is an infrastructure moonshot that perfectly matches the ambitious, systems-level challenges I love taking on.' 'It has become incredibly clear to me that accelerating progress towards safe, well-aligned artificial general intelligence is the most rewarding mission I could imagine for the next chapter of my career,' Lau said in a separate statement.
