India is a very important market for AI, can be a leading force in world: Sam Altman

As India embarks on an exciting artificial intelligence (AI) journey, OpenAI Co-founder and CEO Sam Altman on Wednesday said India is a very important market for AI and the company's second biggest market globally.

The owner of ChatGPT AI models was speaking at an event in the presence of Union Minister for Railways and Electronics and IT, Ashwini Vaishnaw.

According to Altman, who has just announced a massive $500 billion project called 'Stargate' building new AI infrastructure in the US - with SoftBank, Oracle and MGX - over the next four years, said that India should be a leader in the AI model race.

"India is a very important market for AI. It is our second biggest market. Models are still not cheap, but they are doable. India should be a leader there of course," he told the gathering.

He also clarified that his earlier comment on India being able to make or not being able to make large language models (LLMs) were "taken out of context".

According to Minister Vaishnaw, young entrepreneurs in the country are really focused on getting the next level of innovation that will reduce the cost and on the same lines that "we did the Chandrayaan mission, why can't we do the same in the LLM space".

The country is likely to launch its own safe and secure indigenous AI model within six months at an affordable cost, the minister announced last month.

The Indian AI model would help the country emerge as a more reliable technological powerhouse of ethical AI solutions in the days to come. Backed by a high-end common computing facility, the IndiaAI mission is now closer to customising indigenous AI solutions for the domestic context using Indian languages.

Scientists, researchers, developers and coders are working on multiple foundational models in this regard and with the given pace, the Union Minister expressed hope that the Indian AI model is likely to be ready within six months.

The AI model is beginning with the computation facility of roughly 10,000 GPUs. Soon, the remaining 8693 GPUs will be added. It will largely benefit researchers, students and developers in the beginning. The government has decided to give it to the users for less than Rs 100 per GPU after subsidising 40 per cent of the cost.

Compared to global models costing $2.5 to $3 per hour usage, India's AI Model will cost less than less than Rs 100 per hour after a 40 per cent government subsidy.

It is about nine times what the open-source model China's DeepSeek has and about two thirds of what ChatGPT has.