Altman says India could emerge as a potent force in Artificial Intelligence

India second biggest market for OpenAI says its CEO Sam Altman

New Delhi: Two years after his dismissive stance on India’s AI potential raised eyebrows here, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Wednesday gave a ringing endorsement to Artificial Intelligence momentum in the country — and billed India as an important market not just for the new-age technology itself but for the ChatGPT creator as well.

In New Delhi on Wednesday, Altman — while sharing dais with Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw — said India is the second biggest market for the company and that Open AI had tripled its users here in the last year.

---

He made the most of his whirlwind tour to India, meeting industry captains including Paytm Founder-CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Snapdeal Co-Founder Kunal Bahl, Unacademy CEO Gaurav Munjal, Ixigo Group CEO Aloke Bajpai, Filmmaker Shekhar Kapur, Peak XV Managing Director Rajan Anandan, and Partner at leading venture capital firm Accel Prayank Swaroop.

Altman during his first visit to India in June 2023 had called India’s ability to develop a foundational model similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT “totally hopeless” and a few days later had clarified that his point was about the difficulty of competing with established AI giants on cost-efficient foundational models.

Altman’s visit comes days after the finance ministry directed its officers not to download or use AI tools and apps such as ChatGPT and DeepSeek in office computers and devices, saying they pose confidentiality risks to data and documents.

In response to a question on his view on development of low-cost foundational models, Altman said that’s a reference to a comment he made in India a few years ago.

“That was a very specific time when there was a certain scaling thing. I still think that to stay on that frontier of pre-training models is expensive. We are now in a world where we made incredible progress with distillation.

“These reasoning models in particular, it’s not cheap. It’s still expensive to train them, but it’s doable. I think that’s going to lead to an explosion of really great creativity and India should be a leader there,” he said.

Many believe that China’s DeepSeek AI platform developed with USD 6 million investment is based on “distillation” of foundational AI models but there is no clear evidence available.
Altman said India is an incredibly important market for AI in general, for OpenAI in particular.