OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is back in India, two years after he’d first arrived as the messenger of the upcoming AI revolution.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has reached on an India tour. He met India’s IT Minister Ashwani Vaishnaw, and is set to meet Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi as well.
In a fireside chat with Ashawani Vaishnaw, Altman reiterated the importance of India as a market for OpenAI. “India is a very important market for AI. It is our second biggest market, and we’ve have tripled our users here in the last year,” he said.
Altman also responded to the comments he’d made last time, when he’d said that while he thought it was “hopeless” for Indian startups to compete with OpenAI, it was up to Indian startups to prove them wrong. “We are now in a world we have made incredible progress with distillation. Models are still not cheap, but they are doable. India should be a leader there of course,” he said.
“My comments were taken out of context. That was a very specific time when there was a certain scaling thing — and I still think it’s expensive to stay on the frontier of the pre-training models. (But) one of the most exciting things that’s happened in the industry since is that we’re now in a world where we’ve made incredible progress with distillation. We’ve learnt how to build small models — it’s not cheap, but it’s doable. This will lead to an explosion of great creativity, and India should be the leader there, of course,” he added.
Altman also repeated the comments he’d made previously about costs to use AI falling by 10x every year. “We believe that the costs to stay at the frontier (of model development) will rise. (And) the returns to increasing intelligence are exponential in terms of the scientific value you create. On the other hand, the cost of one unit of intelligence one year later will fall by about 10x. Moore’s law was 2x every 18 months, and it changed the world every few decades, but what’s happening with the reduction in cost of AI models is extraordinary,” he added.