ALTMAN CHICKENED. AMERICANS RUSH TO INDIA FOR HELP

Indian Intellects Flipped the Trend. Americans need us more than we need them.

Americans rushed to India, when stuck with a Chinese bombshell, realizing the future of their dreams lies in partnering with the Indians to counter the cost and intellect challenge thrown by Deepseek.

Since then Altman has chewed his words and is insisting that his earlier position on India has been taken out of context. He now understands that India has the strength to help him retain his leadership in AI.

At an interaction during Sam Altman’s first visit to India in June 2023, Altman had said India “should not even try” to build foundational AI models. Since then, Open AI has faced increasing competition from its fellow Big Tech firms such as Meta, which has open-sourced a part of its AI work with its Llama set of models, and Google with its Gemini models. 

Sam Altman's comments about India revealed a concerning disconnect with the nation's technological capabilities and mathematical heritage. His attempt to create anxiety overlooked India's deep-rooted excellence in mathematics and sciences - a legacy that continues through generations of scholars and innovators.

Ironically, Altman's own work since 2015, culminating in ChatGPT's 2022 release, demystified generative AI. The theoretical concepts that once lived in research papers became tangible, observable systems. This democratization of understanding means the fundamental principles of AI are now accessible to those with the right expertise.

The technical challenges ahead – Neural Network Architectures Enabling Language Processing, Training Algorithms Optimization, Hardware Facilitating Large Scale Computation, Content Architecting, Knowledge Organization and Information Structure Design- are substantial but manageable parallel tracks. These components can be developed independently before final integration into a cohesive system. Rather than being intimidating barriers, they represent clear engineering objectives for India's talented technical workforce.

Altman would have walked around with the mighty air, looking down on the others if he was not hit by Deepseek – a missile that was principally meant for President Trump but hit Altman instead. His estimates about time and the investments received a jolt and was forced to look beyond his current team, into the realities of the future.

Humility started dawning upon him, though still contesting the correctness of the time and the investment figures that the Chinese provided, took the first flight to India, yelling for help. Indians as ever obliging and looking for intellectual challenges offered to help him to look beyond what he has currently put together.

He pleaded that his statement that India should “not even try” to build its own foundational AI models was taken out of context.

“In reference to the comment I made in India a few years ago about the cost of building foundational AI models, it was taken out of context. That was a certain time of scaling AI, and I still think that pre-trained foundational AI models are expensive. But, one of the most exciting things that have happened in the industry is that there’s a lot that we’ve done now in distillation of AI models,” Altman said.

“There’s a lot that we’ve done with small models, and reasoning models today are not cheap, but still doable. This can lead to an explosion of creativity, and India should be a leader there.”

More recently, on January 20, Chinese startup Deepseek claimed to have created its foundational AI model, R1, at a fraction of the cost that OpenAI has spent on research and development to date.

While not referencing DeepSeek directly, Altman said that the reduction in cost of AI is a natural way forward, and India’s work through developers and startups is a part of this evolution.

“There are two ways to look at the cost of models. To stay at the frontier, we believe that the costs of building and maintaining foundational models will continue to rise in an exponential curve, but the returns to increasing intelligence are exponential in terms of the economic and scientific value that is being created. Our Stargate Project will go accordingly,” he said.

“At the same time, the cost of a unit of intelligence will drop by 10x in one year. Moore’s Law changed the world with a 2x increase in performance. Now, what’s happening with AI is extraordinary. This doesn’t mean that the world will need less AI hardware, but that we can now do more things with the same amount of hardware, so the total amount of dollars invested will go up,” Altman added.

Altman has recognized the need to broaden his frontiers to maintain his edge over the global competition and this necessitates the need for thousands of highly capable minds. He has also realized that India is uniquely positioned to provide the required intellectual resources in those numbers at competitive rates.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

This partnership represents a strategic alignment of mutual interests. Altman needs India's vast pool of highly fertile brains to maintain OpenAI's competitive edge, particularly against China. For India, this collaboration offers an accelerated path to AI expertise and positions the country to compete globally in AI services and development. The partnership could catalyze India's emergence as a major force in AI, alongside the U.S. and China.