India outpacing world in creativity, AI adoption, Says Sam Altman

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman lauded India’s rapid advancement in artificial intelligence and creative innovation, noting that the country is outpacing the rest of the world in AI adoption.

Altman’s remarks followed an overwhelming demand for OpenAI’s latest image generation tool, which can create Studio Ghibli-style animations. The feature, introduced last week as part of a broader update to ChatGPT, has quickly gained traction.

Responding on social media site X, Altman paid tribute to the Indian adoption of AI, describing it as "incredible to witness" now that "we are seeing the wave of AI adoption in India." He commented, "We love to see this creative explosion—India is leading the way.

Apart from complimenting India's increasing AI influence, Altman posted an AI-generated anime-style photo of himself as an Indian cricket player. Captioning the photo, he wrote about the prompt he used: "Sam Altman as a cricket player in anime style."

Teasing fans of AI, Altman alluded to a forthcoming second iteration of the Ghibli-style feature, hinting that users may not be ready for what is next. "Y'all are not ready for images v2…" he tweeted on Wednesday.

With Ghibli-inspired AI-generated artworks remaining at the forefront of trends online, user activity on ChatGPT has never been more frenzied. Altman confirmed the strains this demand placed on the organization, announcing future OpenAI launches might be slowed as a result of capacity problems.

"We're working to calm things down, but anticipate some delays in new releases, some service interruptions here and there, and slower performance as we contend with capacity," he said.

In a tongue-in-cheek appeal, Altman even called out for more GPU resources, penning, "If anyone has GPU capacity in 100k chunks that we can tap into right away, please call!"

The CEO also disclosed that OpenAI had gained one million users within an hour—an exponential rate compared to the five days it took to gain the same number of users following the introduction of the 4o Image Generation feature.