OpenAI to bring more products to India, make them affordable: Sam Altman
Empower your mind, elevate your skills
India is OpenAI 's second largest market after the US, and may become the largest as it's "incredibly fast growing," Sam Altman , cofounder and chief executive officer of OpenAI."We are especially focused on bringing products to India, working with local partners to make AI work great for India, (making) it more affordable for people across the country. We've been paying a lot of attention here, given the rate of growth," Altman said, answering a question from ET in a media briefing on Thursday. The briefing was held on the sidelines of the launch of GPT-5, OpenAI's latest and most awaited model launch of this year.On the question of software engineers losing jobs due to advanced coding capabilities of GenAI models, he said there is "no evidence" of that.Globally, several companies are laying off employees in large numbers due to productivity gains being realised through GenAI. In India, too, large IT companies including Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) have announced plans to lay off at least 2% of their workforce. Several IT firms have said that close to 30% of their code is now being written through AI.Altman, though, said "the world wants way more software.""We have badly underestimated the amount of additional software that the world has demand for," he said. "We're going to find out that there's unlimited demand for software, and that it'll be a huge unlock for economic growth and opportunity in the world and for related jobs with that."He said OpenAI has "tools that let software engineers be way more productive, and the cost of creating software (will) come down.""AI will use coding as the way to create new interfaces, as a way to sort of share richer experiences, (and) as a way for people to collaborate with each other," he added. Commenting about governments such as those in Australia trying to regulate AI, Altman said different countries are going to try different approaches to AI regulation and that OpenAI will respect laws of different countries."But all world leaders want to make sure that AI thrives in their country, and that the economic growth, the societal benefits of that also come," he added. Altman said he will visit India again in September.Open AI claimed GPT-5 has higher thinking and reasoning skills than other GenAI models, and that it is significantly less likely to hallucinate. The company said the model is more "reliable" and will be free of cost.Nick Turley, head of ChatGPT , said GPT-5 significantly improves multilingual understanding across over 12 Indian languages. "That's really exciting, because, as Sam (Altman) mentioned, India is a priority market for us," he said at the same press briefing. Earlier this week, OpenAI launched two new open-source AI models, marking its first release of this kind since GPT-2 over five years ago."I don't think GPT-5 is AGI (artificial general intelligence) yet, but we are clearly making progress towards incredibly capable systems," Altman said. "This idea that you have a system that can answer almost any question, do some tasks, write software for you, whatever, at PhD levels of expertise, and that this is available freely to anyone in the world (is special)."Altman said a lot more infrastructure needs to be built globally to have AI locally available in all markets.
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