New Delhi: Putting India at the center of the global AI landscape, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman believes that the world’s largest democracy is not only adopting AI at scale but is also shaping its trajectory. “More than 100 million people in India use ChatGPT every week,” he said at the Artificial Intelligence Impact Summit on Thursday, adding that “more than a third of them are students”. He pointed out that India is now the fastest growing market for OpenAI coding agency Codex. “The world’s largest democracy is well-positioned to lead the field in artificial intelligence. Not just building it, but shaping it and determining our future.” He also noted that the use of artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly affordable in countries of the Global South. He said that the cost of OpenAI models has dropped more than 1,000 times in 14 months, and the cost will continue to drop significantly in the future. The high cost of AI infrastructure makes it difficult, especially for smaller companies and startups, to generate a quick return on investment. Artificial intelligence models over the past few months have become so powerful that they can even discover new knowledge, Altman said. “A recent physics result seems to have really surprised a lot of physicists,” he said. Ultraman’s most compelling claim is that humanity may be just a few years away from an early version of true superintelligence. If this proves to be true, “by the end of 2028, more of the world’s intellectual capacity will reside inside data centers rather than outside,” he said. He acknowledged that he might be wrong, but noted that it was an issue worthy of serious consideration. He said a superintelligent system might one day “become the CEO of a major company and do a better job than any executive” or surpass the best scientists in their field of research. However, he warned that increasingly powerful systems could be misused, noting in particular that open source biological models could be misused to create dangerous new pathogens. He acknowledged concerns about the concentration of artificial intelligence in the hands of specific companies and countries. The only way forward, he said, is to democratize artificial intelligence and put these tools into people’s hands, even if that comes with some drawbacks. “All my research on history shows that concentrating AI power in the hands of one company or one country, even in the name of security, is going to be a catastrophically bad thing,” he said. When asked about fair compensation for traditional new media, Altman cited the U.S. fair use doctrine to defend his use. “Our position is that when we show quotes from news articles or opinion pieces or anything like that, we want to do it in a way that we can train with creators to explore new business models.”
