Hopeless' to 'incredible': Sam Altman changes his mind on India's AI plans

"India should go for the full-stack approach in Artificial Intelligence," Open AI's CEO Sam Altman said in an interview with Hindustan Times on Wednesday, and reiterated this during a discussion with India's IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw later the same morning.

- R Sukumar

Altman's comment in terms of what India should be doing is different from one he made in 2023 during a visit to the country. In response to a question, he had said at the time: "It is totally hopeless to compete with us on training foundation models," and suggested that the energies and monies of the government and businesses could be better deployed elsewhere. "That was in a different context," he said in the interview on Wednesday. "That was a time when frontier models were super-expensive to do."

Things have changed since, he added, referring to the AI equivalent of Moore's law which says the processing power of a chip doubles every 18 months. "If you look at the cost curve of AI, we have been able to reduce the cost of a given level of intelligence about 10x every 12 months, which is unbelievably more powerful than Moore's law."