India a Key Market for AI, Poised to Lead Globally: Sam Altman

The owner of ChatGPT AI models was speaking at an event in the presence of Union Minister for Railways and Electronics and IT, Ashwini Vaishnaw.

As India embarks on an exciting artificial intelligence (AI) journey, OpenAI Co-founder and CEO Sam Altman on Wednesday said India is a very important market for AI and the company's second biggest market globally.

The owner of ChatGPT AI models was speaking at an event in the presence of Union Minister for Railways and Electronics and IT, Ashwini Vaishnaw.

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According to Altman, who has just announced a huge $500 billion project called 'Stargate' building new AI infrastructure in the US – with SoftBank, Oracle and MGX – over the next four years, said that India should be a leader in the AI model race.

"India is a very important market for AI. It is our second biggest market. Models are still not cheap, but they are doable. India should be a leader there of course," he told the gathering.

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He also clarified that his earlier comment on India being able to make or not being able to make large language models (LLMs) were "taken out of context".

According to Minister Vaishnaw, really focused young entrepreneurs in the country are really wanting to get to the next level of innovation, which will cut down the cost and on similar lines that "we did the Chandrayaan mission, why can't we do the same in the LLM space".

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The country is likely to launch its own indigenous AI model safe and secure at an affordable cost within six months, the minister announced last month.

The Indian AI model would help the country emerge as a more reliable technological powerhouse of ethical AI solutions in the days to come. With a high-end common computing facility, the IndiaAI mission is now closer to customising indigenous AI solutions for domestic contexts using Indian languages.

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In this regard, scientists, researchers, developers and coders are working on multiple foundational models. With the pace at which things are happening, the Union Minister expressed hope that the Indian AI model is likely to be ready within six months.

The AI model is starting with the computation facility of approximately 10,000 GPUs. Soon, the remaining 8693 GPUs will be added. It will largely benefit researchers, students and developers in the beginning. The government has decided to give it to the users for less than Rs 100 per GPU after subsidising 40 per cent of the cost.

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Compared to global models that will cost $2.5 to $3 per hour usage, India's AI model is expected to be cheap with less than Rs 100 per hour after a 40% government subsidy.

It is nine times the amount China's open-source DeepSeek has and two-thirds what ChatGPT has.

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