Hello and welcome to the CNBC TV18 exclusive. I'm Shireen Bhan and we've got probably one of the biggest headliners here at the India AI Impact Summit, OpenAI's Sam Altman. Sam, great to have you join us on CNBC TV18. It's wonderful to see you here back in India. You were sharing the stage with the Prime Minister just a few moments ago talking about how important India is. But how significant is India for OpenAI specifically? It is your second largest market today.
It is our second largest market and the energy here, what people are building with the technology, is just amazing to watch. We have more than 100 million weekly active users of ChatGPT. This is the fastest growing market for Codex. And it's amazing to see the energy here. Every time I come, it feels like it's gone up another level.
You know Sam, you've also shared the stage with Pratyush Kumar of Sarvam. The last time you were here, there were questions being asked on whether India can do an LLM. Have you had a look at what Sarvam has been able to put out?
India's, yes, but more generally, India is just building incredible AI, the entire AI stack, from data centers to models to applications. And I think there's no country in the world that quite matches India for total AI energy.
Sam, can you give me a sense of what we can expect now from OpenAI for India? How much can you customize OpenAI and ChatGPT for India? What should we expect?
The number one request we get is better support of local languages and dialects, which is something we're hard at work on. And we're open to taking any other requests if you have some.
Is that something that you're going to double down on?
Yeah, we're hard at work on it already now.
Okay. You've just announced a partnership with Infosys, with TCS, and of course you're going to be one of the first clients as far as TCS's data center is concerned. What do you envision as that partnership is concerned? And do you believe you're likely to ink more partnerships here in India, especially on the enterprise side?
Totally. Hard to overstate, as I mentioned earlier, how much energy there is for building AI and building with AI in India. And I think you should expect to see more partnerships and much more activity here as we try to work with the Indian people to bring AI to the rest of the world in all of these amazing ways.
You know, you talked about democratizing AI. You also talked about AI and the need for regulation, or at least a watchdog akin to the nuclear watchdog. You talked about the IAEA. That's an interesting comparison, interesting analogy that you made.
Well, I think all historical analogies are imperfect because every technology is new, every moment is new. But the thing that I like about the nuclear analogy is it was something that the world really did come together on, even countries that normally don't like each other very much, and figured out how we could address the serious concerns of misuse of the technology, but also figuring out how to share the benefits and get nuclear energy out into the world. So, the IAEA has been imperfect. Nuclear technology is an imperfect analogy for AI, but it was a moment of real global cooperation.
Well, you know, you're expecting countries to cooperate, but companies are unwilling to cooperate at this point in time. It's a war out there in the Valley, isn't it?
In some ways, yes. But around AI safety and AI alignment, I find the companies to be pretty collaborative. Same way for countries. I think countries will economically compete, but when it comes to safety and stability, I expect they'll collaborate.
You know, those are big issues, but the number one issue being asked of leaders like you: how sustainable is this business model? The gargantuan spends that companies like yours are making, is it cold red at this point in time?
I think I may be wrong, but if AI stays on the trajectory that it appears to be on, I think we will say, man, we wish that people had invested more earlier and built up more infrastructure earlier. Clearly the industry is making a very big bet, but when we look at the economic utility of these models, as these models start to be able to create such value on their own, you know, we are again kind of running out of capacity and I expect that to happen many more quarters into the future.
But you know, what kind of investments do you believe are going to require? You're saying that this is not enough. What we're already seeing is not enough, and that's trillions of dollars being poured in at this point in time.
You know, in some markets you can say what's the total market, what would be enough, and then there's some other markets where demand is very correlated to price. If we can make intelligence very cheap and very abundant, I think there will be huge amounts of demand. If intelligence is limited and very expensive, there will be less demand. So I think you can talk about how much would be enough at a certain level of capability relative to a certain price, but in the abstract sense, it's hard. On this mission of democratizing AI, that's part of why we think we need to invest so much and we need to make AI so inexpensive, so abundant, so good, such that people can use a ton of it for whatever they'd like.
But what is it going to eventually mean as far as your own bottom line is concerned in monetization? I mean, you've brought in ChatGPT ads with the purpose of being able to monetize and make the business model more sustainable. I know you had a comment to make on the ads that Anthropic put out, calling them crazy dystopic, but that is a fear that people have with what OpenAI can potentially do on that front.
Yeah, if we were, well, there's two parts of the question. There's sort of ads and then business models. I'll do ads first. I think if we were doing what those ads said, of having the AI response and give you a different piece of advice based off of who was paying, that would feel really bad. So our first principle of ads was we won't do that. But like a lot of other, most of the rest of the consumer internet, I think ads in a certain way, in a certain place, can make sense as a model and helps democratize it to people that otherwise wouldn't pay for the subscription but still want to use a lot of AI. On the business model question more broadly, I think we're really starting to see enterprises realize how much they should be willing to pay for AI agents that can help do part of their workload. And my sense is we will see phenomenally huge growth there pretty quickly.
So do you feel comfortable where you find yourself financially today?
