AI Like the Wheel, Fire, Industrial Revolution, Farm Revolution

Pen AI chief executive officer (CEO) Sam Altman spoke to HT's editor-in-chief R Sukumar about artificial general intelligence, India's push for foundational models, his future plans for the country, the emergence of his company's new agent Deep Research, and the potential of making AI work in diverse fields.

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Edited excerpts of an 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 model—that 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 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 there is, while everyone looks at the front end of AI, 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.

Late 2022 was when you announced ChatGPT, and over the weekend, you made the DeepResearch announcement. The pace of change seems to be quite staggering. Microprocessors have Moore's Law. Is there a law on pace of change?