India says OpenAI chief willing to collaborate on AI

NEW DELHI: India’s technology minister said Wednesday that OpenAI chief Sam Altman was “willing to collaborate” with the world’s most populous country in its bid to develop its own cut-price AI systems.

Ashwini Vaishnaw said he held a “super cool discussion” with Altman in the capital New Delhi, where they talked about India’s “strategy of creating the entire AI stack” of graphics processing units (GPU), models and apps.

Vaishnaw said Altman was “willing to collaborate with India on all three”, without giving further details. Altman said that India was OpenAI’s second biggest market, with its users in the country of 1.4 billion people tripling in the past year.

“India is an incredibly important market for AI in general and for OpenAI in particular,” Altman told a closed-door meeting of Indian tech developers, in comments broadcast by the Press Trust of India news agency.

“I think India should be one of the leaders of the AI revolution,” Altman said. “It’s really quite amazing to see what the country has done, in embracing the technology and building the entire stack of things on top of it.”

OpenAI was the firm that brought generative models to public consciousness in 2022 with the launch of ChatGPT. Vaishnaw referenced India’s space mission, which has included landing an unmanned craft on the Moon in 2023, matching the achievements of established space powers at a much cheaper price tag.

“Our country sent a mission to the Moon at a fraction of the cost that other countries did,” Vaishnaw said, in a speech alongside Altman. “Why can’t we do a (AI) model that will be a fraction of the cost?”

Altman told Vaishnaw that he was “really excited to do a lot more together”. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is to co-host an artificial intelligence summit in France from February 10-11, which Altman is expected to attend.

Altman is on a whirlwind tour of Asia, and signed a deal in South Korea on Tuesday with tech giant Kakao. The US firm is seeking new alliances after the release of Chinese rival DeepSeek last month shook the global AI industry.