Make OpenAI affordable for developers: Top Indian startup chiefs to Altman

The importance of India to OpenAI was stated by Altman, when he said that India is the second largest market for OpenAI

Make OpenAI models affordable for developers and introduce India-specific pricing. This was the message from top Indian startup founders to OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman on Wednesday.

 

Altman gave a ringing endorsement to Artificial Intelligence momentum in India and billed it as an important market for new-age technology.

 

Altman, along with chief product officer Kevin Weil, and vice-president of engineering, Srinivas Narayanan, met a select group of Artificial Intelligence-driven startup founders, venture capitalists, developers, and students in multiple closed-door sessions on Wednesday.

 

Indian startup leaders such as Aloke Bajpai, the group chief executive officer of travel planning platform Ixigo, Vijay Shekhar Sharma, the CEO of Paytm, Kunal Bahl, the co-founder of Snapdeal, Raghav Verma, the co-founder of Chaayos, Gaurav Munjal, the CEO of ed-tech platform Unacademy, and Aakrit Vaish, the CEO of Haptik attended these meetings and closed-door sessions.

 

 

Peak XV managing director Rajan Anandan and filmmaker Shekhar Kapur also attended the meetings.

 

"Many suggested that there is a need for India-specific pricing. Google, Microsoft and others also have different pricing. It is important for OpenAI to think on these lines as the global pricing may not work in the Indian context," said a founder who attended the session.

 

These sessions were focused on understanding the Indian user perspective and preferences, the issues they were facing while using the various application programming interfaces (APIs) developed by OpenAI, and the pricing of these APIs, among others, people who attended these sessions said.

 

"Acknowledgment that pricing is high currently and for mass scale adoption, it would need to come down dramatically. Possibly more updates on that in the future," posted Kunal Behl, co-founder Sanpdeal on X.

 

They acknowledged that India is their second-largest market and recognised the need to enhance support for Indic languages. They demonstrated how every new model launched has improved in accuracy and showcased notable advancements in Indian languages like Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Kannada, Telugu, Punjabi, Malayalam, and others.

 

“It was an engaging meeting where we had a candid discussion about how companies in India are leveraging OpenAI’s technology and the challenges we face. They were also keen to understand our expectations from them and how their roadmap is shaping up. The team was highly forthcoming, openly sharing insights into their near-term plans,” Aloke Bajpai, Group CEO, ixigo told Business Standard.

 

The top leadership of OpenAI was also open to discussing the pricing of the APIs and how that can be made more accessible to Indian users, another startup founder said, asking not to be named.

 

 “We spoke about a lot of the people who are using these products from OpenAI and the kind of applications that are being made on top of their foundation model. It was a very engaging conversation with them,” a third person who attended the meetings said.

 

The OpenAI team also apprised the developers and startup executives of the improved accuracy of their models in Indian languages such as Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Kannada, Telugu, Punjabi, Malayalam, and others, one of the meeting attendees said.

 

The leadership also talked about making the models open-sourced at some point in the future without giving much details, a startup founder said.

 

“More than making it open source, we will have to see what the USP (unique selling point), the price point and compute (of the model) is. In India, it is no longer a question of whether you can build a model but it is a question of whether you can build that model for a billion people,” PayTM's Vijay Shekhar Sharma said.