AI belongs to everybody: Altman

The pace of change in artificial intelligence (AI) is "unbelievably more powerful than Moore's Law", Sam Altman, chief executive officer (CEO) of ChatGPT creator OpenAI said in an interview on Wednesday, when he was in India as part of a larger tour of several countries.

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The tour comes barely a fortnight after the release of China's DeepSeek RI shook the market values of some of the world's biggest tech and AI firms. While he said he was initially sceptical of DeepSeek's lowcost claims, he regarded the making of powerful small language models the most exciting development in the past year.

Excerpts from an extensive interview: I'm sure you've been looking at the announcements that India has made on its AI program. You were here sometime back and you made these comments about how India was better off not trying to do its own frontier modelthat became controversial. Has your view changed? And do you think the Indian AI plan is on the right track?

That was in a different context. That was a different time when frontier models were super-expensive to do. And you know, now, I think the world is a very different paradigm. I think you can do them at way lower costs and maybe do incredible work. India is an incredible market for AI in general, for us too. It's our second biggest market after the US. Users here have tripled in the last year. 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. And India will build great models.

What are your plans in India? Because while everyone looks at the front end of AI, there is this huge back end. What you're doing in the US now, for instance, in partnership with SoftBank, is creating this huge infrastructure. Do you plan to bring some of that infrastructure to India?

We don't have anything to announce today, but we are hard at work, and we hope to have something exciting to share soon.