OpenAI has made a major talent acquisition, hiring Sachin Katti, an IIT Bombay graduate and one of Intel’s most influential AI leaders. Katti, who served as Intel’s Chief Technology Officer and Chief AI Officer, has exited the chipmaker after four years to join the team behind ChatGPT. His move signals a significant shift within the global AI landscape, where top technical minds are increasingly gravitating toward companies developing frontier-level systems.
Intel confirmed his departure in a statement, saying CEO Lip-Bu Tan will now take over leadership of the company’s AI and Advanced Technologies Group. The announcement comes during a period of aggressive restructuring at Intel, which has been attempting to close the widening gap with Nvidia and regain relevance in the exploding AI data-centre market. Despite Intel’s long-standing dominance in CPUs, it has yet to deliver a competitive alternative to Nvidia’s AI chips, a challenge that Katti was deeply involved in before his exit.
His arrival at OpenAI, meanwhile, was met with an enthusiastic public welcome. OpenAI President Greg Brockman wrote on X that he is “incredibly excited” to work with Katti on designing the massive compute infrastructure required for future AGI systems. Katti responded with equal enthusiasm, calling it a privilege to join OpenAI’s mission while expressing gratitude for his time at Intel.
Katti’s career path reflects an unusual blend of academic excellence, entrepreneurial ambition, and industry leadership. After graduating from IIT Bombay and completing his Ph.D. at MIT, he spent years as a professor at Stanford University, conducting pioneering research in wireless communication and networking. He also founded successful technology startups, including Kumu Networks, known for its groundbreaking self-interference cancellation technology, and Uhana, an AI-driven mobile network optimisation platform later acquired by VMware.
Beyond academia and startups, Katti became a key figure in global telecommunications, co-chairing the O-RAN Alliance’s Technical Steering Committee and helping push open, intelligent radio access networks into mainstream adoption.
For OpenAI, his arrival comes at a pivotal moment. Training the next generation of models requires unprecedented compute power, specialised networking, and hardware-software optimisation at a scale few engineers have experience with. Katti’s background positions him at the intersection of all three.
His move from Intel to OpenAI is emblematic of a broader industry trend: the world’s top AI engineers are increasingly leaving traditional chipmakers for AI labs shaping the future. And with OpenAI preparing the next leap in artificial intelligence, Katti’s role will be central to building the infrastructure that makes it possible.