OpenAI’s Sam Altman to Visit India, A Country He ‘Loves’

OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman is set to visit India on February 05, Reuters quoted, citing sources. He is likely to meet Indian government officials in Delhi. 

In an exclusive interview with AIM in November last year, Pragya Misra, public policy and partnerships lead at OpenAI and the only employee of the company in India, said, “He [Altman] just loves India.” 

Misra also revealed that every time she spoke to Altman about the use cases India is building, he asked how the headquarters could help India to scale that using OpenAI’s technology. 

“Compared to many of the solutions we see out of other countries from the developer ecosystem, the stuff that is coming out of India is just incredible,” she said, adding that the company has plans to expand the team in India. 

Altman’s visit to India comes at a time when the company is battling legal issues with media publishers in the country. Last year, ANI sued OpenAI for infringing copyright and alleged that ChatGPT was capable of reproducing its content verbatim. 

Recently, more digital news outlets, such as the Indian Express, Hindustan Times, NDTV, and the Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA, which represents 20 media companies), joined the lawsuit. 

However, OpenAI opposed the inclusion of DNPA in the lawsuit and argued it doesn’t have any stake in the matter. 

Two years ago, Altman was in New Delhi and also met the prime minister, Narendra Modi. Back then, Altman made a controversial comment saying it was totally hopeless (for India) to compete with OpenAI in building foundation models. It irked a large number of people in the country.

Altman was responding to former VP of Google India, Rajan Anandan, who asked Altman about how India could build ‘substantial’ foundational models with a budget of 10 million versus 100 million. 

In stark contrast, China’s DeepSeek has trained an AI model (DeepSeek-V3) with just $5.5 million, and their latest model, the DeepSeek-R1 is better, if not on par with every other competitor. Moreover, these models are available on MIT’s open-source license for free. 

Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity, urged India to build an AI model of their own instead of focusing on use cases. He even offered financial support for a potential team of engineers with ambitions to build a DeepSeek-like model in the country. 

That said, India’s IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw announced at the Utkarsh Odisha Conclave that India will have their own large language model ‘soon’. The initiative will be driven by the IndiaAI Compute Facility, which has acquired 18,000 GPUs to support the creation of an LLM tailored to the country’s needs.