PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Romal Thoppilan

Romal Thoppilan is an AI researcher whose work spans conversational models and multimodal AI. At BITS Pilani, he studied computer science when Google hired him in 2013. He coauthored Meena in 2020 and LaMDA in January 2022; by 2023 he was a researcher at Character.AI after seven years at Google Brain. His 2025 Gemini 2.5 paper explores advanced reasoning, multimodality, long context and next-generation agentic capabilities. As of October 2026, he works at Google DeepMind and speaks at a Peer AI webinar on applying generative AI to life-sciences knowledge work.

Works
3
Citations
1,455
h-index
3

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 22 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. 2013

    Computer science at BITS

    In 2013, he studies computer science at BITS Pilani.

  2. 2013

    A Google offer at BITS

    Google hires him in 2013 while he is a seventh-semester computer-science student at BITS Pilani.

  3. 2020

    The Meena chatbot

    He coauthors the Meena paper in 2020; it presents a multi-turn, end-to-end open-domain chatbot trained on public social-media conversations.

  4. January 2022

    LaMDA for dialog

    In January 2022, he is a senior software engineer on Google Research's Brain Team and coauthors LaMDA, a family of Transformer-based neural language models specialized for dialog.

  5. By 2023

    Researcher at Character.AI

    By 2023, he works as a researcher at Character.AI after seven years at Google Brain.

  6. 2025

    The Gemini 2.5 paper

    In July 2025, he coauthors Gemini 2.5, a paper on advanced reasoning, multimodality, long context and next-generation agentic capabilities.

  7. As of October 2026

    Google DeepMind researcher

    As of October 2026, he works at Google DeepMind. He speaks at Peer AI's webinar on applying generative AI to life-sciences knowledge work.

Career

  1. NowGoogle DeepMind
  2. From 2022Google BrainSenior Software Engineer
  3. 2020Google
  4. Character.AIResearcher

Education

  1. Birla Institute of Technology and Science, PilaniComputer Science student

From the biography and OpenAlex affiliations (the years of papers that list the organization), so some years are approximate.

Most-cited works

  1. LaMDA: Language Models for Dialog Applications2022 · 778 citationsWith Apoorv Kulshreshtha, Dmitry Lepikhin, Heng-Tze Cheng, Meredith Ringel Morris, Quoc Le and Ray Kurzweil
  2. Towards a Human-like Open-Domain Chatbot2020 · 614 citationsWith Apoorv Kulshreshtha and Quoc Le

From OpenAlex, as of 21 October 2026.

  1. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labsIncludes Romal Thoppilan. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labs. We compare publishing careers, recent citations, dual appointments and job moves across 2,420 university researchers and 308 frontier-lab researchers.
  2. Google had the most people shaping AI every year from 2014 to 2025Includes Google. Our estimates of which organizations employed the most people shaping AI each year from 1955 to 2025, tracing the shift from university labs to companies.
  3. Google has the highest combined h-index among AI organizationsIncludes Google. We estimate that Google holds the highest combined h-index at 8,016, while universities account for 73% of the deduplicated total across AI organizations.
  4. 20% of people at companies who shape AI also hold a university role, led by Google and Stanford UniversityIncludes Google. We estimate that 539 of the 6,766 people with a known current organization (8%) hold both a university role and a company role, including 20% of people at companies and 13% of people at universities.

Colleagues

People with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Romal Thoppilan yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Two BITS Pilani students offered highest pay package till date digitallearning.eletsonline.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. Towards a Human-like Open-Domain Chatbot research.google. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. LaMDA: Towards Safe, Grounded, and High-Quality Dialog Models for Everything research.google. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. LaMDA: Language Models for Dialog Applications arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. Fuga de cerebros en los equipos de inteligencia artificial de Google businessinsider.es. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. Practical Insights into Applying GenAI Life Sciences Knowledge Work getpeer.ai. Checked 21 October 2026.