OpenAI Is Enthusiastic About Assisting Companies And Education In India

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who is now in India, stated that the business is committed to supporting entrepreneurs in the nation and that discussions are already ongoing to promote this project. He also mentioned that education is one of his favourite topics.

The CEO of OpenAI stated that at the time, supporting entrepreneurs in India took precedence over having an office in India. “With the energy we have seen from startups here, we are very excited to figure out how we can support them,” he said, adding, “We had some conversations yesterday with Indian startups, and we would love to invest in Indian startups.”

Altman met with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday and discussed artificial intelligence potential in India, he said at an event at the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) in Delhi.

“We discussed the opportunities for AI in India as well as the need to think about global regulation,” Altman said during a fireside chat hours after meeting with the PM. He stated that education is his passion. “We had a chat with the PM about it (education) earlier today, and we would love to work with India on this,” he said.

Altman also emphasised the necessity of regulation in AI as well as the need for a transition to clean energy for training these models. “We want to be net zero as soon as possible.” We’re looking into a variety of cooling options that don’t involve the use of fresh water.”

Last month, the ChatGPT creator collected $175 million to form a startup fund to support firms seeking to push the boundaries of AI. For quite some time, the business has been funding AI startups. It announced in November 2022 that it would grant $1 million to ten AI businesses as well as early access to its technologies. However, despite the fact that several Indian firms have quickly adopted ChatGPT and GPT-4 (the underlying platform of ChatGPT), they have yet to obtain funding from OpenAI.

According to Stanford University’s annual AI Index report, issued in April, India will get the world’s fifth-greatest investment in AI companies in 2022, trailing only the United States, China, the United Kingdom, and Israel. Last year, Indian AI startups raised $3.24 billion.

Uniphore, a conversational AI business based in Chennai, raised $400 million in February, the most ever raised by an Indian AI startup, bringing its valuation to $2.5 billion.

“We are now designing systems that have significant energy usage,” Altman said, adding that the industry should push hardware as much as possible while also pushing for model optimisation.

OpenAI is a San Francisco-based artificial intelligence startup that has developed sophisticated large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-3.5 and GPT-4.

In April, the Microsoft-backed business secured $300 million at a valuation of $29 billion. Microsoft, its largest investor, is said to have invested about $10 billion in it and has utilised its technology to launch new services and products such as Azure OpenAI, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and Bing Chat.

In his statement before a US Senate committee last month, Sam Altman stated that countries should establish an oversight agency to oversee and licence AI companies. He also stated that AI firms such as his own should be audited independently. Altman also signed an open letter released by the Centre for AI Safety, warning that AI poses a threat to human extinction. Other industry executives and scientists who signed the letter were Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, AI scientist Geoffrey Hinton, Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott, and Stability AI CEO Emad Mustaque.

Altman’s testimony comes at a time when there is rising concern about the potential downsides of artificial intelligence, particularly generative AI, which can use data to make human-like stuff like images, prose, and music in seconds. Its disadvantage is that it might cause hallucinations and provide false and hazardous content.

Several executives, led by Elon Musk, called for a six-month embargo on the development of more powerful AI models in March.

Nasscom, India’s IT industry group, issued recommendations earlier this week to set universal criteria for responsible research, development, and application of generative AI in India. The guidelines aim to assist the industry in using generative AI for societal good while also increasing trust in the technology.