OpenAI and India’s collaborative ties has gained momentum with the company having plans to soon start an Indian office. From appointing Indian-origin leaders in advisory roles to bringing OpenAI executives to India, the company’s expansion plans in the country will be a fruitful one for both the parties. 

Rishi Jaitly, who has held executive positions including the position of Vice President at Twitter, will assume the role of a senior advisor at OpenAI to guide the company through India’s AI policy and regulatory environment. Furthermore, OpenAI executives Anna Adeola Makanju , global head of Public Policy, James Hairston, and Jaitly recently met MoS for Electronics and Information Technology, Rajeev Chandrashekar.  

From left to right: Rishi Jaitly, Rajeev Chandrashekhar, Anna Adeola Makanju, and James Hairston. Source: X

In the backdrop of Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence Summit (GPAI) that happened a few days ago, where India’s stance on aggressive AI expansion and development was evident, the OpenAI executive’s meeting with the minister fortified the company’s plan to be a prominent AI competitor in the Indian landscape. 

India : The Precious Market

As per recent statistics, ChatGPT has over 180 million users, with the US contributing to 10.81% of total users, followed by India with 9.08% users. Being the 2nd highest market for ChatGPT, India’s contribution to the OpenAI market is already well placed. Big tech companies, such as Google, are already choosing India as a destination for building their biggest offices outside the US. 

With favourable business conditions, and progressive policies, India has been an attractive market. By setting up an Indian office, OpenAI will be able to capitalise on the same. 

Third in Line 

London was the first office outside the US which OpenAI opened in June, followed by another in Dublin, three months later. Going by the recent developments, OpenAI will open its third office in India in a couple of months. 

Interestingly, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had an extensive world tour this year, visiting a number of countries in an attempt to build strategic relationships with world leaders and even be the face of ChatGPT. At that time, he had also visited India and met Prime Minister Narendra Modi, possibly laying the groundwork for future expansion plans.

OpenAI is also set to host its first developer conference in Bengaluru in January. This will be OpenAI’s second developer conference after hosting its maiden one in November. OpenAI VP of engineering, Srinivas Narayan, is expected to visit leaders and developers at the conference. 

India’s LLM Moment in the Making

Having an office in India, will also benefit India’s status on the global AI race too. Furthermore, if an office comes up here, it would mark the first OpenAI office in Asia, even surpassing Japan, which was touted to have the next office, after Altman met Japan’s PM and even discussed promoting AI models that will entail Japan’s culture. 

In the recently concluded GPAI, the country has committed to building its own AI models, and initiatives are already on track. Recently, KissanAI launched Dhenu 1.0, an agriculture large language model which is bilingual and comprehends English, Hindi and Hinglish queries. Founded by Pratik Desai, KissanAI caters to the agriculture market which is expected to hit $451.59 billion by 2028. Dhenu 1.0 processes 3,00,000 instruction sets in both English and Hindi. 

Language-specific models have been on the rise with a number of companies following suit. Bangalore-based Sarvam AI that raised $41 million in Series A funding, released OpenHathi-Hi-v.01, a Hindi LLM which was built on Llama2-7B. 

CoRover.ai has recently partnered with Google Cloud to launch BharatGPT, a generative AI conversational bot catering to the Indian market. The model will support over 14 languages in text, voice and video interactions. 

India’s foray into Indic-language models, and building datasets specific to India, has been ongoing. AI4Bharat, and Bhashini, have been other projects that have been building Indic-level datasets. 

An unlikely automotive player, Ola, also unveiled an India-centric AI model called Krutrim AI which powers an AI chatbot similar to ChatGPT. It is said to understand 22 Indian languages and generate text in 10 languages.

Not just in India, but on the global front as well, there are demographic-specific models which are competing with OpenAI. UAE’s Jais, an Arabic LLM and A171, an AI company that will build on Falcon model, a proprietary model of Abu Dhabi’s Technology Innovation Institute. China is also catching up. With the recent Baidu’s Ernie 4.0 LLM model, which is bilingual, with English and Chinese, OpenAI’s competitor market is only diversifying. 

It is evident that OpenAI’s push to enter the Indian market comes at a time when the country is likely going to witness a surge of India-specific models, which would fare better in an Indian subcontext.