ChatGPT developer OpenAI is committed to supporting India's AI Mission's application development initiatives, a senior company official said on Wednesday, highlighting that concrete use cases for artificial intelligence (AI) are emerging in India in sectors such as agriculture, healthcare and education.
OpenAI keeps India in mind while taking important decisions, said Srinivas Narayanan, vice president of OpenAI, and supported India's AI mission.
Narayanan said this at the Global India AI Summit. India's AI Mission This is a “shining example” of end-to-end public investment in generative AI, not just for the Global South but for the world at large.
Narayanan, who heads OpenAI's engineering division, including ChatGPT and APIs (developer platform), said the company's senior executives visit India from time to time and participate in various forums and events there to “keep abreast” of developments unfolding in the country.
“We keep India in mind while taking any major decision,” he said.
Launched about a year and a half ago, ChatGPT was initially conceived as a modest research preview, but over the past 18 months it has become transformative, impacting people’s lives in ways never before imagined.
AI is being used in many new industries in India and across the world.
Narayanan spoke at length about how India is leveraging AI, pointing out examples of its use in agriculture, education and healthcare.
AI is adding speed to India's already thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem, he noted.
“Entrepreneurs understand a gap in the market and develop innovative products, and tools like ChatGPT help accelerate this in an entirely new way,” he said, adding, “We're reducing the cost of intelligence, empowering developers to write code, and empowering them to create fully conversational and natural computing interfaces.”
“This journey from being focused on challenges and work to being an audacious startup and national mission has been truly inspiring,” he said.
OpenAI is committed to supporting the India AI Mission's application development initiatives so that Indian developers can build models and deliver societal benefit at scale, Narayanan asserted.
“We are keen to continue our dialogue with the IT Ministry to see where we can add the most value,” he said.
Citing specific examples of AI being used in India, he said that in agriculture, new age technology can provide more support to farmers in rural areas, while in education, providing personalised learning on a large scale is a “huge opportunity”.
In this context, he mentioned the NGO Digital Green, which developed a chatbot called Farmer Chat based on GPT4 to provide farmers with relevant information and advice. In the education sector, he said, companies like Physics Wallah are providing personalized exam preparation to millions of people based on products like ChatGPT.
“A final shining example is the IndiaAI mission itself, which sets a great example not just in the global south but across the world of what end-to-end public investment in generative AI means,” he said.
OpenAI has learned a lot about India, he said, adding that it has followed feedback from developers to reduce costs and worked on improving language support across all its models.
“We are committed to learning more from India and are already seeing results,” he said, noting that the company has appointed a new head of policy and partnerships in India.
OpenAI wants artificial intelligence to align with core human values, and safety is at the core of its mission.
“We want to maximize benefits while reducing harm. To do this, we have a unique opportunity to build new institutions that establish international order and cooperation in the same way that the world came together in the last century in many areas, including finance, health and the environment,” he said.
According to OpenAI executives, India is taking a unique approach to making AI work for people through initiatives like digital public infrastructure, giving rise to innovative services like UPI.
“India has a key leadership role to play in developing these institutions and leading the beneficial adoption of AI,” Narayanan asserted.
