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The OpenAI CEO said that India is the company’s second biggest market globally and the number of users in the country have tripled in the past year
Sam Altman also held a closed-door meeting with Indian startup founders and investors, which saw the tech entrepreneurs largely pitching for India-centric pricing for OpenAI
ixigo cofounder Aloke Bajpai discussed challenges faced by Indian companies in leveraging the OpenAI stack and potential solutions to address them
OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman said that India is an “incredibly important” market for the artificial intelligence (AI) giant.
During a fireside chat with information technology (IT) minister Ashwini Vaishnaw on Wednesday (February 5), Altman said that India should be one of the leaders of the AI revolution. He said it is “really quite amazing” for him to witness the way the country has so far embraced the technology and built use cases on top of existing large language models (LLMs).
The OpenAI CEO also noted that India is OpenAI’s second biggest market globally, adding that the number of users in the country have tripled in the past year.
Responding to a question about what aspects India should focus on on the AI front, Altman said, “I really want to echo the comments about the full-stack approach… But mostly seeing what people in India are building with AI at all levels of the stack – the stack, chips, models, all the incredible applications, India should be doing everything. India should be among the leaders of the AI revolution. It’s really quite amazing to see what the country has done…”.
Altman is on a multi-country world tour and landed in India late on Tuesday night. Earlier in the day, he met IT Minister Vaishnaw and multiple Indian startup founders and VCs. He is also expected to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
He met startup founders like Paytm’s Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Unacademy’s Gaurav Munjal, Fractal’s Srikanth Velamakanni, ixigo’s Aloke Bajpai, and HeathifyMe’s Tushar Vashisht in a closed-door meeting.
The meeting was also attended by notable investors like Rajan Anandan and Harshjit Sethi of Peak XV Partners, Prayank Swaroop of Accel, and Lightspeed Venture Partners’ Hemant Mohapatra.
Founders Bat For India-Specific Pricing
A source told Inc42 that the meeting between the founders and Altman largely centred around tech entrepreneurs pitching the company for India-centric pricing. Indian founders told Altman that big tech giants like Microsoft, Google and Amazon already have India-specific pricing and that global pricing may not work in the Indian context.
The founders also pitched the OpenAI CEO to ensure the company’s offerings, including its APIs, are more affordable for Indian developers and companies. This, a founder on the condition of anonymity said, would enable small startups to adopt OpenAI’s models in a big way.
Altman said that the company is considering special pricing for the Indian market but steered clear of making any promises. The OpenAI CEO also said that he expects costs to decline “rapidly” over time as the company makes newer and more powerful models.
In a post on X, cofounder and Snapdeal and Titan Capital Kunal Bahl said that there was acknowledgment that pricing for OpenAI products is “high” and the cost would have to come down “dramatically” for mass scale adoption.
“… They recognise that the foundational models can only go as far (“80-90% of the way”) and for specific industry/company contexts a robust application layer will be needed to take it to the 100% levels. This is important for the many startups in India building in the application layer,” Bahl added.
“As ChatGPT becomes an entry point for information research for users, the intention is to not charge for linking out of ChatGPT (unlike Google), as they believe it can impact the perception of trust in the results. Interesting implication for intent based ads businesses like Google and those who spend a lot on them,” Bahl said.
ixigo cofounder and group CEO Aloke Bajpai said he discussed challenges faced by Indian companies in leveraging the OpenAI stack and potential solutions to address them.
“Our discussions revolved around various AI-driven use cases, including Indic languages and voice applications. It was also exciting to hear about their plans with deep research mode, Operator (newly released AI agent), glimpses of superintelligence in o3 (OpenAI’s reasoning model) and how these offerings are pushing AI boundaries,” Bajpai told Inc42.
Meanwhile, Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma told Moneycontrol that some attendees during the meeting pointed out that the cost of DeepSeek APIs is “dramatically” lower compared to OpenAI APIs. Without committing, Altman, as per Sharma, said that both options of open sourcing and reducing costs are on the table.
Lightspeed India partner Mohapatra, in a post on X, noted that there is a need for more global AI leaders to visit India and understand the needs of the local market and build for it. He also underlined that the country is the largest open market for AI, outside the US.
Altman, who is visiting India after two years, is currently on a multi-nation tour spanning Japan, South Korea, the UAE, and Germany.
The trip comes at a time when OpenAI is facing major headwinds amid the rise of Chinese AI search engine platform DeepSeek, which claims to have built AI models that can rival top-tier models from US companies such as OpenAI, Meta, and Google at a fraction of the cost.
India boasts one of the world’s largest developer pools and population. Setting a concrete base in the country will enable OpenAI to ramp up its revenues.
The trip also comes as the AI juggernaut is facing a flurry of copyright infringement cases for allegedly using the content of local digital platforms and book publishers to train its chatbot ChatGPT, without authorisation.
Meanwhile, in a bid to stave off any further regulatory headwinds, OpenAI has also reportedly kicked off discussions for data localisations. As part of this, the company is looking to house the data of its Indian users within the country itself.
“OpenAI is looking for ways to expand its India presence, which is a natural process since India is one of the biggest developer ecosystems for the company… It has already begun discussing ways to localise its Indian citizens’ data in domestic data centres, in anticipation of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023. The move to localise data operations is likely to commence soon,” a person privy to the development told Livemint.
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