India is a Very Important Market for AI, says OpenAI’s Sam Altman in Delhi

As part of his global tour, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is in Delhi today for the company’s DevDay, joined by India’s IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw and OpenAI’s policy lead Pragya Misra. 

Altman underlined India’s significance in the global AI ecosystem, also calling it their second biggest market. 

He clarified that his comment about India’s foundational models two years ago is being taken out of context. “That was a very specific time with scaling laws. But we are now in a world where we have made incredible progress with distillation,” he said, referring to the power of small models and reasoning models. He also said models are still not cheap, but they are doable, and India can be a leader. 

Back then, Altman had said it was totally “hopeless for India to compete with OpenAI in building foundation models”. 

Altman still maintained that AI training costs will continue to rise exponentially, but the returns in intelligence and revenue will also grow significantly. 

These comments come in light of DeepSeek’s rise. 

According to him, near-term AI models are already reaching the threshold of being good enough to address critical issues like healthcare and education—sectors where India has much to gain from AI innovation. However, he emphasised that the technology is not yet advanced enough to cure cancer or similar diseases.

Adding to this, Vaishnaw spoke about how India’s young entrepreneurs are focused on pushing innovation to the next level while keeping costs down. He compared it to the Chandrayaan mission, asking why the same ambition and efficiency couldn’t be brought to developing large language models (LLMs).

Altman also spoke about OpenAI’s recent release, deep research, a new capability in ChatGPT that independently conducts multi-step research on the internet.  “Deep research can do a single digit percentage of all economic, time consuming tasks. It can make you twice as efficient,” he said.

During this trip, Altman is also set to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi, along with other policymakers and developers.

His visit comes at a time when India is ramping up its AI ambitions. Just yesterday, Ola chief Bhavish Aggarwal announced Krutrim AI Lab and the launch of several open source AI models tailored to India’s unique linguistic and cultural landscape. 

The IndiaAI Mission seeks to build a comprehensive ecosystem that fosters AI innovation by democratising computing access, enhancing data quality, and developing indigenous AI capabilities.