Sam Altman spoke on ChatGPT future plans for India, artificial general intelligence and DeepResearch. OpenAI chief executive officer (CEO) Sam Altman on Wednesday called India an incredible market for artificial intelligence (AI) in general. He said Indian users of OpenAI have tripled in the last year. Altman, who is in India, spoke to HT’s Editor-in-Chief R Sukumar on ChatGPT’s future plans for India, artificial general intelligence and DeepResearch.
That was in a different context . That was a different time when frontier models were super expensive to do. And you know, now, I think the world is very different paradigm. I think you can do them at way lower costs and maybe do incredible work. India is an incredible market for AI in general, for us too. It’s our second biggest market after the US. Users here have tripled in the last year. The innovation that’s happening, what people are building [in India], it’s really incredible. We’re excited to do much, much more here, and I think it’s (the Indian AI program) a great plan. And India will build great models.
What are your plans in India? Because there is, while everyone looks at the front end of AI, this huge back end. What you’re doing in the US now, for instance, in partnership with SoftBank, is creating this huge infrastructure. Do you plan to bring some of that infrastructure to India? We don’t have anything to announce today, but we are hard at work, and we hope to have something exciting to share soon. Late 2022 was when you announced ChatGPT, and over the weekend, you made the DeepResearch announcement. The pace of change seems to be quite staggering. Microprocessors have Moore’s Law. Is there a law on pace of change here?
DeepResearch is the thing that has most felt, like ChatGPT, in terms of how people are reacting. I was looking online last night and reading — I’ve been very busy for the last couple of days, so I hadn’t gotten to read the reviews — and people look like they’re having a magical experience, like they had when Chatgpt first launched. So this move from chatbots into agents, I think, is having the impact that we dreamed at night, and it’s very cool to see people have another moment like that. Moore’s law is, you know, 2x every 18 months (the processing power of chips double every 18 months), and that changed the world. But if you look at the cost curve for AI, we’re able to reduce the cost of a given level of intelligence, about 10x (ten times) every 12 months, which is unbelievably more powerful than Moore’s law. If you compound both of those out over a decade, it’s just a completely different thing. So although it’s true that the cost of the best of the frontier models is on this steep, upward, exponential [curve], the rate of cost reduction of the unit of intelligence is just incredible. And I think the world has still not quite internalised this.
