ChatGPT maker OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman met with IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw to discuss India’s AI strategy and address previous comments about AI development. During the meeting, Altman also explained the “hopeless” remark he made a few years ago and expressed his willingness to collaborate with India on building its AI stack, encompassing GPUs, models and apps. Vaishnaw highlighted India’s cost-effective approach to technology with the Chandrayaan 3 mission as an example.This meeting signifies a potential partnership between OpenAI and India in the field of AI, with Altman showing support for India’s vision of democratising technology. He also said that India is the second-largest market for OpenAI adding that the company tripled its number of users here in the past year.
What Sam Altman said about his “hopeless” comments
During his meeting with Vaishnaw, Altman also clarified that his remarks at The Economic Times Conversations in 2023, where he stated that Indian startups may struggle to develop foundational models due to high computing costs and that competing with OpenAI was “hopeless,” were taken out of context.
Altman explained: “That was a very specific time when there was a certain scaling thing where I thought and I still think, just staying on that frontier of creature models is expensive. But one of the most exciting things that’s happened to me since the bad things happen in the industry. Since we’re now in a world where we made incredible drugs with distillation, we learned a lot about doing small models, and this reasoning in models, in particular, can be that it’s not cheap. It’s still expensive to train them, but it’s doable, and I think that’s going to lead to an explosion of really great creativity. And you know, India should be the leader there.
There are two different ways you can look at the costs of models, to stay at the frontier. We believe those costs will continue to rise on this exponential curve, but also the returns to increase the intelligence are exponential in terms of the economic value of the scientific value that you would create.
So, we’re doing this big Stargate project, and that’s going to go like this. On the other side of it, the cost for a given unit of intelligence one year later seems to fall by about 10x. Was a 2X every 18 months for the number of transitions on a chip and that changed the world if you waited a few decades.
But, what’s happening with the reduction in cost in AI models, is extraordinary. Now, I don’t know what it means that the world’s gonna need any less AI hardware because you bring the cost down and just the people are going to use it for a lot more things. The total number of dollars will go up, but that’s a really exciting thing happening.”