OpenAI CEO Sam Altman may visit India on Wednesday, February 5, 2025, news agency PTI reported, citing unnamed sources.
HT couldn’t independently verify the information.
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The visit is to meet top government officials and engage in an industry fireside chat, according to the report.
This would be Altman’s second India trip in two years and comes at a time of a lawsuit by news agency ANI which claims the artificial intelligence (AI) giant used its content for training AI models without compensation.
OpenAI has however said that it only uses publicly available data and argued that Indian courts have no jurisdiction on the matter.
It also comes at a time when the dominance of OpenAI as well as other top western AI models in the AI realm has been challenged by low-cost Chinese upstart DeepSeek with its R1 model.
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It reportedly cost less than $6 million to build and consumes only a fraction of power that a model like that of ChatGPT uses. The US tech industry which had long-justified putting billions of dollars into AI was forced to watch to disbelief.
On top of this, DeepSeek even overtook ChatGPT as the top-ranked free app on Apple’s Appstore.
As a result of all of this, AI chipmaking giant Nvidia lost $590 billion in market cap last Monday. This was the largest one-day stock wipeout of any company in history.
This also came at a time when US President Donald Trump announced Stargate, the $500 billion AI data centre infrastructure project planned by OpenAI, Masayoshi Son’s SoftBank, and Oracle.
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OpenAI had also created SB OpenAI Japan, a 50:50 held company in Japan, along with SoftBank.
Meanwhile, India has also outlined its global AI ambitions and plans to launch its own indigenous model costing less than ₹100 per hour to run,’ IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw had announced.
