OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stated that India’s adoption rate of AI (artificial intelligence) is very impressive. 

On April 2, 2025, Altman made a statement in a post on X, saying, “What’s happening with AI adoption in India right now is amazing to watch. We love to see the explosion of creativity- India is outpacing the world.”

This remark came shortly after OpenAI launched a ChatGPT feature that turns photos into Studio Ghibli-style images. This feature has gone viral, particularly in India, leading to a massive surge in ChatGPT usage. Altman himself noted that OpenAI gained a million new users in just one hour right after this particular update.

Back in February, Altman emphasised that India is a vital market, both for the advancement of AI and for OpenAI’s success. He expressed his altered views on India’s AI potential, from hopeless to incredible.

He first said India’s development of a ChatGPT-level model was “totally hopeless,” then explained he meant it would be difficult to compete on cost with established players in foundational AI. 

He said, “That was a very specific time when there was a certain scaling thing. I still think that to stay on that frontier of pre-training models is expensive. We are now in a world where we made incredible progress with distillation. These reasoning models in particular, it’s not cheap. It’s still expensive to train them, but it’s doable. I think that’s going to lead to an explosion of really great creativity and India should be a leader there”.

He said India is the second biggest market for OpenAI as its users tripled in the last year.

Source: https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/sam-altman-openai-says-india-outpacing-the-world-in-ai-adoption-101743612106896.html