5 hours Ago By CNBCTV18
Sam Altman landed in India late on Tuesday (February 4) night. He will be meeting the top rung of the Indian government, first calling on Prime Minister Narendra Modi and then India's IT, Rail and I&B Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw. This would be Sam Altman's first visit since his comments in 2023 that it would be "hopeless" for India to compete with OpenAI on training foundational models like ChatGPT.
Just last week, Ashwini Vaishnaw announced that the government would be inviting interest from India's leading start-ups to develop an indigenous, foundational large language model that would compete with leading AI models like ChatGPT, Gemini and DeepSeek. The minister had announced that India is aiming for a model to be ready in about 10 months. Interestingly, MeitY Secretary S Krishnan, while speaking to CNBC-TV18, noted that India would hope to build on an open-source model, to make its own LLM.
ChatGPT, unlike DeepSeek, is not an open-source model. The OpenAI's visit also comes amidst a major upheaval in the world of AI, with Chinese DeepSeek challenging Silicon Valley dominance. DeepSeek proved to be a major disruptor, beating models like US-developed ChatGPT, on multiple benchmarks.
DeepSeek is also reported to have achieved its success, despite severe restrictions, slapped by the Joe Biden administration on China, from importing cutting-edge chips from companies like NVIDIA. DeepSeek is also reported to have been developed with about $6 million — a fraction of the multi-million-dollar budget that OpenAI had . In the recent interaction with the press, Vaishnaw had confirmed that India would bring open-source-based DeepSeek to Indian servers .
By bringing DeepSeek to Indian servers, the government is aiming to keep user data from travelling to China. Concerns about the use of DeepSeek and data travelling to China have already prompted countries like Italy and Australia to ban the AI model. OpenAI is also in the midst of a legal challenge in India.
Country's leading mainstream news broadcasters and publishers have moved the Delhi HC alleging copyright infringement. They have argued that OpenAI used publicly available content generated by these news companies to train its AI models. News companies and publishers have argued that though the content is available to the public, it is still protected under copyright laws.
OpenAI has argued that no court in India has the jurisdiction to try the company for copyright violations. As per the company its servers are located, not in India, but in the US. It claimed that challenge, if any, would have to filed in California.
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