In U-turn, OpenAI's Sam Altman wants India to lead AI revolution

Amid an AI revolution sparked by DeepSeek, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman now feels that India must emerge as one of the leaders in the AI landscape.

This is a dramatic U-turn for Altman, who in 2023 had rejected the idea of a foundational model from India even coming close to the levels of OpenAI's software.

Altman made the laudatory comment during a discussion with IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw.

Praise for India

“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,” media reports quoted him as saying.

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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,” he added.

“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.”

DeepSeek challenge

The comments came amid the dramatic rise of Chinese AI start-up DeepSeek, piling up unprecedented pressure on OpenAI and also other Western AI companies.

DeepSeek is a Chinese artificial intelligence company that develops open-source large language models.

It is owned and funded by Chinese hedge fund High-Flyer, whose co-founder Liang Wenfeng established the company in 2023 and serves as its CEO.

Also read | DeepSeek versus OpenAI: How the real Artificial Intelligence fight is heating up

West versus China

In particular, DeepSeek's V3 and R1 AI models are available for free, rattling companies like OpenAI and others to lower prices or risk losing market share to the Chinese company.

Before DeepSeek, a handful of US companies dominated the AI landscape, the most prominent being Microsoft, OpenAI, Google and Meta.

DeepSeek's open source AI models have shown that other countries can also take on the US tech giants.

Altman’s earlier observation

Altman made the 2023 comments to The Economic Times.

Also read | How China's DeepSeek is challenging AI giants like OpenAI, Google’s Gemini

“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,” he said.

The Indian government has announced that an Indian foundation model could be a reality in about 10 months.