OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s second India visit focuses on AI strategy, startup collaboration

On his second visit to India on February 5, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman led a closed-door meeting with top startup founders and investors to discuss the company's strategy for the Indian market.

Among the attendees were key figures from the startup ecosystem, including Aloke Bajpai (Group CEO, ixigo), Vijay Shekhar Sharma (CEO, Paytm), Kunal Bahl (Co-founder, Snapdeal), Raghav Verma (Co-founder, Chaayos), Gaurav Munjal (CEO, Unacademy), Aakrit Vaish (CEO, Haptik), and others.

“India is a key priority for OpenAI, as it stands as the second-largest developer market globally. The OpenAI team was incredibly humble and transparent. Beyond tactical discussions, the session was a candid exchange of feedback on how they can improve their offerings to better support startups,” Aloke Bajpai, Group CEO of Ixigo, tells YourStory. 

"The discussion was mostly on the different AI-driven use cases, spanning Indic languages, voice applications, etc. We have been an early adopter of OpenAI’s tools to build TARA, our AI-powered voice assistant, along with our proprietary dataset, to enhance the overall experience for our customers,” Bajpai adds.

Altman also held talks with Union Minister for Railways, Electronics, and IT, Ashwini Vaishnaw, to discuss India's vision for a self-reliant AI stack through GPUs, foundational models, and applications. Vaishnaw later shared on X (formerly Twitter) that the US-based firm has expressed willingness to collaborate with India across these three pillars.

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“Had a super cool discussion with Sam Altman on our strategy of creating the entire AI stack—GPUs, models, and apps. Willing to collaborate with India on all three,” Vaishnaw posted.

Kunal Bahl, Co-founder of Titan Capital, who also attended the closed-door meeting, highlighted his top key takeaways from the event in a post on X. 

“Interesting discussions in the closed door meeting with Sam Altman and the OpenAI team today in Delhi. Top 3 takeaways for me. One, Humility. They recognise that the foundational models can only go as far ("80-90% of the way") and for specific industry/company contexts a robust application layer will be needed to take it to the 100% levels. This is important for the many startups in India and building in the application layer,” read Bahl’s post.

“Second, is the acknowledgement that pricing is high currently and that for mass-scale adoption, it would need to come down dramatically. Possibly more updates on that in the future,” he added.

Bahl said that as ChatGPT increasingly becomes a go-to source for information research, OpenAI has no plans to charge for linking out of ChatGPT—unlike Google—since doing so could affect user trust in the results. 

“Interesting implication for intent-based ads businesses like Google and those who spend a lot on them,” Bahl added. 

Altman’s visit comes at a time when India is ramping up its AI ambitions, with government and private sector players keen on building AI solutions. 

Vaishnaw recently announced that the government will provide over 18,600 high-end GPUs for AI development to entities across the country in the coming days, along with plans to build India's own AI foundational LLM within 10 months.