OpenAI's stress test

When OpenAI announced on Tuesday that ChatGPT would be formally available in India at ₹399 a month, the number felt both modest and momentous.

- SIDDHARTH PAI

Modest because the figure sits well with the monthly discretionary budget of our urban middle class, somewhere between the price of a streaming subscription and a mobile data pack. Momentous because it signals the formal arrival of a technology that, until recently, was more a curiosity or an occasional free experiment for most Indian users than a sustained part of their digital lives.

By pegging the entry cost at a psychologically accessible level, OpenAI has opened the floodgates to a market whose scale, diversity, and linguistic complexity could shape the future of artificial intelligence (AI) itself. India's importance to OpenAI cannot be overstated. We have nearly 800 million internet users, second only to China, and one of the fastest-growing bases of English-speaking digital natives. However, unlike China, we are not walled off behind regulatory firewalls or domestic substitutes; global apps compete directly for the attention of Indian consumers.

For OpenAI, this means the opportunity to expose its system to one of the largest pools of active users, in a country where the hunger for shortcuts, hacks, and new learning tools is insatiable. Indians have historically been early adopters of global digital platforms—think of how quickly WhatsApp became ubiquitous, or how aggressively ride-hailing and food delivery apps embedded themselves in urban life. It is no accident that most major tech companies now test their cost-sensitive innovations in India before exporting them elsewhere.