OpenAI’s Srinivas Narayanan Lauds Bhashini’s Efforts

OpenAI Vice President Srinivas Narayanan praised Bhashini for its efforts in tackling the language barrier during the inaugural ceremony at the Global India AI Summit, Bharat Mandapam, New Delhi. “Language barriers are one of the superpowers of large language models, and this is one area that we have been working on. We want to applaud the government’s Bhashini efforts,” he said.

He added that the company is open to new partnerships worldwide, including in India, with a shared purpose.

“India is already harnessing the power of AI and taking a long view of what might underlie an AI for our future as the world's largest democracy seeks to realize further its development dreams of being a Viksit Bharat by the time it celebrates 100 years as an independent nation in 2047,” he said.

"We have been developing a growing habit on a leadership team to keep learning from India," Narayanan said, emphasizing the company's commitment to understanding and addressing the unique needs of the Indian market. "We're keeping India in mind in whatever important decisions we are making,” he said. 

OpenAI recently hired Pragya Misra, its first employee in India, as the government relations head to lobby the Indian government and create a safe space for OpenAI to eventually operate in the country without any hindrance. 

Speaking of AI’s applications in India, he said the technology has already added speed and dynamism to India's entrepreneurial ecosystem.

“We're reducing the cost of intelligence, enabling developers to write code, and helping them create completely conversational and natural interfaces to computing. I think this is helping people be a lot more productive and opening up opportunities for higher-level problem solving.”

OpenAI’s latest model, GPT-4o, has made considerable improvements when it comes to Indian languages. It supports over 50 languages and has notably optimized token usage for Indian languages, reducing Gujarati by 4.4 times, Telugu by 3.5 times, Tamil by 3.3 times, and Marathi and Hindi by 2.9 times.

"Language and cost are top of mind for OpenAI. We have received a lot of feedback from the Indian community, and GPT-4o was developed to address this feedback," he said.

Narayanan also said that OpenAI is open to assisting India and its AI mission. "We are here to help India and its AI mission. We are excited about the application development initiative. OpenAI is ready to help in any possible way, whether it's providing access to models or more," he added.

"India has a unique approach to making technology beneficial for people through initiatives like the Digital Public Infrastructure which has created transformative services like UPI. An ascendant India has an essential, leading role to play in the development of these institutions," he said, urging the government to participate in the discourse on advancing AI safety research.