Sam Altman says ‘India outpacing the world’ in AI adoption

OpenAI chief executive director ship's officer (CEO) Sam Altman on midweek hailed unreal intelligence service (AI) adoption in India.

In a post on X, Altman said,"what's happening with ai adoption in india right now is amazing to watch. We love to see the explosion of creativity--india is outpacing the world."

In February, Altman had billed India as an important market not just for AI, but for OpenAI too.

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

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It was a stark contrast to Altman's views on India during his visit to the country in 2023.

He 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.

"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," PTI quoted Altman as saying.

Altman said India is an incredibly important market for AI in general, for OpenAI in particular.

"It's our second biggest market. Tripled users here last year, but mostly seeing what people in India are building with AI at all levels of the stack, chips, models, you know, all of the incredible applications. I think India should be doing everything. I think India should be one of the leaders of the AI revolution," he said.

To assuage the pricing debate triggered by China's DeepSeek AI platform across the industry, Altman attempted to address the curiosity of stakeholders with projection that the cost of intelligence unit in development of AI technology will drop about 10 times after a year.

Altman said there has been incredible development of technology in India where the company has tripled its user base last year and sees the country as one of the leaders in the AI revolution.

He said the cost of developing model models in AI is still not cheap but there has been a lot of progress in AI that will require less hardware and the rest of it can be used for other purposes.

"The cost for a given unit of intelligence, one year later, seems to fall by about 10x," Altman said.

(With PTI inputs)

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