India Ought to be at the Forefront of the AI Revolution: Sam Altman

Nitin Konde, Varun Bhardwaj

06 Feb 2025 — 3 min read

India Must Be at the Forefront of AI Revolution: Sam Altman

India is an "incredibly important" market for the massive artificial intelligence (AI) company, according to Sam Altman, founder and CEO of OpenAI. Altman stated that India ought to be among the front-runners of the AI revolution at a fireside chat with Ashwini Vaishnaw, the minister of information technology (IT), on Wednesday, February 5. He described the nation's adoption of the technology thus far and the use cases that have been developed on top of the large language models (LLMs) that are already in place as "really quite amazing."

The CEO of OpenAI added that the country's user base has tripled in the last 12 months, making it the company's second-largest market worldwide. When asked what areas India should prioritise in the field of artificial intelligence, Altman stated that he truly wanted to reaffirm the remarks regarding the full-stack approach.

However, given what Indians are creating with AI at every stage of the stack—chips, models, the stack, and all the amazing applications—India ought to be taking the lead. India ought to be one of the pioneers of the AI movement. Seeing what the nation has accomplished is quite astounding. Altman arrived in India late on the evening of February 4th while on a multi-country global tour.

Meeting Government Heads and the Big Players of Indian Startup Sector

He met with several Indian company owners and venture capitalists earlier in the day, as well as IT Minister Vaishnaw. Additionally, he is anticipated to meet with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He has private meetings with startup founders such as Vijay Shekhar Sharma of Paytm, Gaurav Munjal of Unacademy, Srikanth Velamakanni of Fractal, Aloke Bajpai of ixigo, and Tushar Vashisht of HeathifyMe.

Prominent investors Prayank Swaroop of Accel, Hemant Mohapatra of Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Rajan Anandan and Harshjit Sethi of Peak XV Partners also attended the conference. Pricing for Founders Bat in India According to a media reports, tech entrepreneurs primarily pitched the company for India-centric pricing at the founders' meeting with Altman. Indian creators informed Altman that global pricing might not be effective in India and that major tech companies like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon already have pricing tailored to India.

In order to guarantee that OpenAI's products, including its APIs, are more reasonably priced for Indian developers and businesses, the founders also made a pitch to the CEO of the company. Although Altman refrained from making any commitments, he stated that the company is thinking about offering customised pricing for the Indian market. The CEO of OpenAI added that as the company develops more advanced and potent models, he anticipates expenses to drop "rapidly" over time.

Cofounder Kunal Bahl of Snapdeal and Titan Capital acknowledged in a post on X that OpenAI product prices are "high" and that they must drop "dramatically" in order to be widely adopted. They acknowledge that the basic models can only go so far ("80-90% of the way") and that a strong application layer will be required for particular industry/company contexts in order to raise it to 100%. For the numerous Indian businesses developing at the application layer, this is crucial," Bahl continued.

Tug of War Between Open AI and Chinese DeepSeek

The tour takes place at a time when OpenAI is facing significant challenges due to the emergence of DeepSeek, a Chinese AI search engine platform that claims to have developed AI models that can compete with the best models from US firms like OpenAI, Meta, and Google at a far lower cost. India has one of the biggest populations and developer pools in the world.

OpenAI will be able to increase its earnings by establishing a physical base in the nation. The trip coincides with a wave of copyright infringement cases against the AI giant for allegedly exploiting local digital platforms' and book publishers' content to train its chatbot ChatGPT without permission.

Meanwhile, OpenAI has apparently started talking about data localisations in an effort to ward off any additional regulatory obstacles. The corporation wants to store its Indian consumers' data in the nation itself as part of this. Since India is one of the company's largest developer ecosystems, OpenAI is naturally seeking methods to increase its presence there.

In preparation for the Digital Personal Data Protection Act of 2023, it has already started talking about ways to localise the data of its Indian citizens in domestic data centres. A person with knowledge of the development told Livemint that the drive to localise data operations is probably going to start soon.