Shaken by the deep impact of Chinese artificial intelligence model DeepSeek, the founder and CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, the pioneering maker of American artificial intelligence model ChatGPT came to India last week as part of a world tour to keep things relevant for his company. India is the second-biggest market for ChatGPT, where it has tripled its user base in the last one year, he said.
Altman met IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, along with a number start-ups and venture capital funds. “India is an incredibly important market for AI in general and OpenAI in particular. It is our second-biggest market, we tripled our users here in the last year,” Altman said during a discussion hosted by OpenAI.
Vaishnaw was also present at the talk, and spoke about India’s three-pronged approach to AI, where the country is focusing on designing chips, building foundational models, and AI applications.
“But mostly seeing what people in India are building, the stack, chips, models, all the incredible applications — India should be doing everything, India should be among the leaders of the AI revolution. It’s really quite amazing to see what the country has done…” Altman said.
Altman’s Asia tour also coincided with the meteoric rise in popularity of DeepSeek, a foundational model created by a Chinese AI lab at a fraction of the cost of OpenAI’s which is said to match the firm’s models on many fronts.
DeepSeek’s model has shown to the world that cutting edge foundational models could be built at cheaper costs, unlike the huge investments that have gone into making OpenAI’s models.
“We are now in a world where we have made incredible progress with distillation. We have learned to do small models and these reasoning models in particular… It’s not cheap, it’s still expensive to train them, but that is going to lead to an explosion of really great creativity. India should be a leader there, of course,” Altman said, addressing a question on the lowering costs of building AI models.
“There are two different ways to look at the cost of the models: to stay at the frontier, we believe, those costs will continue to rise on this exponential curve. But also the returns to increase the intelligence are exponential…” he said.