OpenAI CEO Sam Altman seems to have backtracked on his earlier comments about India’s AI progress and now states that India should be one of the leaders of the AI revolution. Altman made the comments during a discussion with IT Minister and Ashwini Vaishnaw.
Speaking to OpenAI’s Pragya Misra and Union Minster Ashwini Vaishnaw, Altman said,“India is an incredibly important market for AI in general, for OpenAI in particular. It’s our second biggest market after the US. Users here have tripled in the last year. The innovation that’s happening, what people are building [in India], it’s really incredible. We’re excited to do much, much more here, and I think it’s (the Indian AI program) a great plan.”
“I think India should be one of the leaders of AI revolution. It’s really quite amazing to see what the country has done and embrace the technology and build it. ” the OpenAI CEO added.
Why did Sam Altman change his stance on India’s AI potential?
In an interaction with the The Economic Times in 2023, Sam Altman had rejected the idea of a foundational model from India even coming close to the levels of OpenAI’s softwares. He said, “Look, the way this works is we’re going to tell you it’s totally hopeless to compete with us on training foundation models. You shouldn’t try, and it’s your job to try anyway, and I believe both of those things.”
However, with the recent rise of Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, there has been increasing pressure on OpenAI and other Western AI companies. In particular, DeepSeek’s V3 and R1 AI models are available for free, which has put increasing pressure on OpenAI to lower its prices or risk losing market share to the Chinese company.
Prior to DeepSeek’s emergence a handful of US companies were ruling the AI landscape most prominent of them being Microsoft, OpenAI, Google and Meta. But the open source AI models from DeepSeek have shown that other countries also have a chance to compete with US tech giants.
IT Minister Vaishnaw last week announced India’s plans to build its own AI models and has recently confirmed that an Indian foundational model could be a reality in around 10 months.
