OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Says India's AI Startup Potential "Totally Hopeless"

[Riaz Haq]

Responding candidly to a question in the Indian capital New Delhi, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said: "The way this works is we're going to tell you, it's totally hopeless to compete with us on training foundation models you shouldn't try, and it's your job to like try anyway. And I believe both of those things. I think it is pretty hopeless." This occurred at an event organized by The Economic Times where Altman answered a question by Rajan Anandan, a former Vice President of Google in India and South East Asia and current venture capitalist.  

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in India

Altman in Delhi: 

Sam Altman, the young CEO of OpenAI, the company that recently launched its revolutionary Generative AI app ChatGPT, was in India as part of a six-nation tour to discuss AI regulation.  ChatGPT has been trained on massive amounts of data and text from the internet, textbooks, newspapers, magazines and academic journals. It can write computer code and carry on sophisticated conversations on a lot of different subjects. Altman is also visiting China. He was invited to speak at an event sponsored by Indian publication Economic Times.  Here's the full exchange between Anandan and Altman about the potential for an Indian AI startup:

Anandan: "Sam, we have got a very vibrant ecosystem in India but specifically focussing on AI, are there spaces where you see a startup from India building foundational (AI) models; how should we think about that. Where is it that a team from India, with three super-smart engineers having not 100, but USD 10 million each could actually build something truly substantial?"

Altman: "The way this works is, we're going to tell you. It's totally hopeless to compete with us on training foundation models. You shouldn't try, and it's your job to like trying anyway. And I believe both of those things. I think it is pretty hopeless."

Challenge Accepted:

Judging by social media responses, most Indians reacted angrily to Altman's negative remarks. They accused him of "arrogance". Others saw his statement as a challenge and responded by accepting the challenge. 

Tech Mahindra CEO CP Gurnani said he accepts the challenge.  “OpenAI founder Sam Altman said it's pretty hopeless for Indian companies to try and compete with them. Dear Sam Altman, from one CEO to another...CHALLENGE ACCEPTED,” tweeted Gurnani.

India's Tech Industry:

Americans like Sam Altman know that India's tech industry is made up mainly of companies that are essentially body shops. These companies like Infosys, TCS and others supply Indian H1B workers to perform routine tasks in IT operations departments of western companies. These companies' revenue, labeled India's "IT exports", comes from the substantial cuts they keep from the wages of millions of Indian H1B workers. These workers replace higher-paid American employees.  Rapid developments in AI technology are now threatening such jobs. 

In 2016, India filed a complaint with the World Trade Organization (WTO) when the US raised visa fees to $4000 for each H1B worker visa. Indian government argued that it is discriminatory to the country under its trade agreement with the US.

Indian startups are not based on any original ideas born in India. They are essentially copies of similar e-commerce or logistics or payments startups in the western world. 

Altman in China:

Altman is also visiting China this week. “China has some of the best AI talent in the world and fundamentally, given the difficulties in solving alignment for advanced AI systems, this requires the best minds from around the world,” Altman told participants at the event hosted by the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence.

Western Media:

Indians were justifiably very proud of their great scientific achievement when the India Space Agency ISRO successfully launched the nation's Mars Mission back in 2013. The New York Times, America's leading newspaper, mocked India with a cartoon depicting the country as a dhoti-wearing farmer with his cow knocking on the door of the Elite Space Club. 

New York Times Cartoon Der Spiegel's Cartoon Comparing India and China

In an article titled "Paper Elephant", the Economist magazine talked about how India has ramped up its military spending and emerged as the world's largest arms importer. "Its military doctrine envisages fighting simultaneous land wars against Pakistan and China while retaining dominance in the Indian Ocean", the article said. It summed up the situation as follows: "India spends a fortune on defense and gets poor value for money".

After the India-Pakistan aerial combat over Kashmir, New York Times published a story from its South Asia correspondent headlined: "After India Loses Dogfight to Pakistan, Questions Arise About Its Military".  Here are some excerpts of the report:

"Its (India's) loss of a plane last week to a country (Pakistan) whose military is about half the size and receives a quarter (a sixth according to SIPRI) of the funding is telling. ...India’s armed forces are in alarming shape....It was an inauspicious moment for a military the United States is banking on to help keep an expanding China in check".

Der Spiegel Cartoon:

In April this year, German publication Der Spiegel published a cartoon as India surpassed China as the world's most populous nation. The cartoon poked fun at India's lack of progress relative to its northern neighbor. It shows jubilant Indians on an old and overcrowded train – many on the roof – as it overtakes a sleek Chinese bullet train.

German Cartoon Comparing China and India. Source: Der Spiegel

Spanish Newspaper Cartoon:'

In May 2022, Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia published a story titled "La hora de la economia India" along with a cartoon showing an Indian snake charmer. Indian media reacted angrily to what they saw as a racist stereotype. 

Spanish Cartoon on Indian Economy. Source: La Vanguardia

US Disrespects India: 

Notwithstanding the geopolitically-motivated public rhetoric of US presidents and other western leaders, the fact is that they do  not respect India. "One hard truth that Indians have to contend with is that America has also had difficulty treating India with respect", writes former Singaporean diplomat Kishore Mahbubani in his latest book "Has China Won?". "If America wants to develop a close long-term relationship with India over the long run, it needs to confront the deep roots of its relative lack of respect for India", adds Ambassador Mahbubani. It's not just Mahbubani who suspects the United States leadership does not respect India. Others, including former President Bill Clinton, ex US President Donald Trump, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and CNN GPS host Fareed Zakaria have expressed similar sentiments. 

Source: @BeltandRoadDesk

Trump and Clinton:

There is some evidence to support Ambassador Mahbubani's assertion about America's lack of respect for India. For example,  ex US President Bill Clinton said in 1990s that India has a Rodney Dangerfield problem: It can’t get no respect, according to his deputy secretary of state Strobe Talbott. In a diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks in 2010, Hillary Clinton referred to India as "a self-appointed frontrunner for a permanent UN security council seat."

More recently, US President Donald Trump mocked Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi about Indian contribution to Afghanistan.  Trump said he got along very well with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, but the Indian leader was "constantly telling me he built a library in Afghanistan". "That's like five hours of what we spend... And we are supposed to say, 'oh, thank you for the library'. I don't know who is using it in Afghanistan," Trump said.

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[Riaz Haq]

India's Modi is not the world's guru

https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/India-s-Modi-is-not-the-world-s-guru

Publicity campaign ahead of G20 summit strikes the wrong note


Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar


In the run-up to the Group of 20 summit this weekend in New Delhi, billboards and bus stops in every Indian city are plastered with images of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who will preside over the gathering of leaders from around the globe.

The posters hail India, via Modi, as a Vishwaguru -- a Sanskrit term for world guru or teacher to the world. Similar advertisements have covered the front pages of major newspapers.

India has never seen an advertising blitz of this magnitude. A former finance secretary estimated the cost at 10 billion rupees ($121 million) and rising. He sees the push as the start of Modi's 2024 reelection campaign.

It is of course convenient to have the government, rather than the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), pay for this ad campaign. Indian politicians of all stripes have done similar things in the past, but the scale of the current campaign beggars description.

By law, the most that can be spent on a campaign for a parliamentary seat is 9.5 million rupees. The legal cost to contest all 543 seats in the Lok Sabha would thus be no more than 5 billion rupees.

Critics who think Modi is trying to impress foreign visitors are clearly mistaken. This advertising blitz is aimed at financing the promotion of the prime minister in the election run-up, portraying him as a great leader of not just India but the world.

This message plays well with the Hindu nationalist BJP, whose members believe India was the greatest and richest civilization in the world in ancient times but then enslaved and impoverished by Muslim and British invaders. Modi himself says he has rescued India following centuries of "enslavement."

In the face of both threats and inducements, the Indian media is not talking much about Modi's use of government money to advance a personality cult or boost his election prospects. Dissenters of all sorts, whether in business, media or the nonprofit sector, have faced raids for supposed tax or foreign exchange violations that are likely to keep them tied up in court for years.

Indian media companies, meanwhile, are making millions of dollars from running Modi's advertisements, which they would lose if they played their intended democratic role of speaking truth to power. Very few are willing to pay this price.

Modi's notion of being the world's guru is just as ridiculous as his twisted history of "centuries of enslavement," which has been used to attack India's religious minorities.

A guru is nothing without disciples. If India or Modi himself is the world's guru, who are the disciples? The least likely candidates are Western powers which believe, rightly or wrongly, that they are the true global gurus.

It might seem that India's disciples would be most likely to come from its geographic neighborhood rather than distant lands. But even a cursory examination shows otherwise.

Does Pakistan regard India as a guru? No, it is India's greatest foe. It has allied with China, India's other major foe, to try and put India in its place. No disciples there.

What about Bangladesh, which India helped to achieve independence from Pakistan in 1971? There is now little gratitude for India's help, which is accurately viewed as a ploy to split and disempower Pakistan rather than an altruistic move to aid Bangladeshis.

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina is about the only Bangladeshi politician to express somewhat pro-Indian views, and even she has to step carefully. The Hindu share of Bangladesh's population has shrunk from 30% at the time of Pakistan's independence in 1947 to 7.5% today, as many have migrated to India to escape discrimination and persecution. No sign of Indian disciples in Bangladesh.

[Riaz Haq]

India's Modi is not the world's guru

https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/India-s-Modi-is-not-the-world-s-guru

Publicity campaign ahead of G20 summit strikes the wrong note


Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar


A guru is nothing without disciples. If India or Modi himself is the world's guru, who are the disciples? The least likely candidates are Western powers which believe, rightly or wrongly, that they are the true global gurus.

It might seem that India's disciples would be most likely to come from its geographic neighborhood rather than distant lands. But even a cursory examination shows otherwise.

Does Pakistan regard India as a guru? No, it is India's greatest foe. It has allied with China, India's other major foe, to try and put India in its place. No disciples there.

What about Bangladesh, which India helped to achieve independence from Pakistan in 1971? There is now little gratitude for India's help, which is accurately viewed as a ploy to split and disempower Pakistan rather than an altruistic move to aid Bangladeshis.

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina is about the only Bangladeshi politician to express somewhat pro-Indian views, and even she has to step carefully. The Hindu share of Bangladesh's population has shrunk from 30% at the time of Pakistan's independence in 1947 to 7.5% today, as many have migrated to India to escape discrimination and persecution. No sign of Indian disciples in Bangladesh.

Sri Lanka? Many there harbor ill will toward New Delhi in the belief that it supported the development of the Tamil Tiger insurgency when Indira Gandhi was India's prime minister in the early 1980s. The insurgency became a civil war in which up to 100,000 were killed. Hard to find disciples there.

What about Nepal, a predominantly Hindu nation? Ever since then-Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru intervened in a royal power struggle in 1951, Nepalese have viewed New Delhi as an imperial power to be feared. India has on more than one occasion blocked essential supplies to Nepal to try to exert political influence. Nepalese may be Hindus, but they are anything but Modi's disciples.

What about the West? It sees India as a rising economic power to be wooed. Western investment is pouring into India and the West lauds India's success in digital payments, financial inclusion and social programs.

But some in the West also castigate the Indian government for eroding democratic values and human rights and suppressing civic groups. Freedom House, an American rights group, downgraded India from "free" to "partly free" in its 2021 index of political and civil liberties around the world. Sweden's V-Dem Institute classifies India as an "electoral autocracy."

In its annual World Press Freedom Index, Reporters Without Borders ranked India a dismal 161st. In the global Human Freedom Index compiled by the Cato Institute, India fell from 75th place in 2015 to 112th in 2022.

Indian government officials criticize these indexes as flawed. Maybe so, but the notion of India as a Vishwaguru sounds like a bad joke in the West.

India has certainly provided the world with yoga, transcendental meditation and the Bhagavad Gita. Indian mathematicians invented the concept of zero and sundry equations in ancient times. Bollywood has global fans today for its films and music.

This adds up to a reasonable amount of soft power. Alas, it is not the stuff of which world gurus are made.

[Riaz Haq]

How China’s new AI model DeepSeek is threatening U.S. dominance


https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/24/how-chinas-new-ai-model-deepseek-is...

A little-known AI lab out of China has ignited panic throughout Silicon Valley after releasing AI models that can outperform America's best despite being built more cheaply and with less-powerful chips.

DeepSeek, as the lab is called, unveiled a free, open-source large-language model in late December that it says took only two months and less than $6 million to build, using reduced-capability chips from Nvidia called H800s.

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China’s cheap, open AI model DeepSeek thrills scientists


https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00229-6


A Chinese-built large language model called DeepSeek-R1 is thrilling scientists as an affordable and open rival to ‘reasoning’ models such as OpenAI’s o1.

These models generate responses step-by-step, in a process analogous to human reasoning. This makes them more adept than earlier language models at solving scientific problems and could make them useful in research. Initial tests of R1, released on 20 January, show that its performance on certain tasks in chemistry, mathematics and coding is on par with that of o1 — which wowed researchers when it was released by OpenAI in September.

“This is wild and totally unexpected,” Elvis Saravia, an AI researcher and co-founder of the UK-based AI consulting firm DAIR.AI, wrote on X.

R1 stands out for another reason. DeepSeek, the start-up in Hangzhou that built the model, has released it as ‘open-weight’, meaning that researchers can study and build on the algorithm. Published under an MIT licence, the model can be freely reused but is not considered fully open source, because its training data has not been made available.

“The openness of DeepSeek is quite remarkable,” says Mario Krenn, leader of the Artificial Scientist Lab at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light in Erlangen, Germany. By comparison, o1 and other models built by OpenAI in San Francisco, California, including its latest effort o3 are “essentially black boxes”, he says.

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China’s AI industry has almost caught up with America’s And it is more open and more efficient, too

https://www.economist.com/briefing/2025/01/23/chinas-ai-industry-ha...

The WORLD’s first “reasoning model”, an advanced form of artificial intelligence, was released in September by OpenAI, an American firm. o1, as it is called, uses a “chain of thought” to answer difficult questions in science and mathematics, breaking down problems to their constituent steps and testing various approaches to the task behind the scenes before presenting a conclusion to the user. Its unveiling set off a race to copy this method. Google came up with a reasoning model called “Gemini Flash Thinking” in December. OpenAI responded with o3, an update of o1, a few days later.

[Riaz Haq]

Pakistan Launches Its First Homegrown AI Chatbot Zehanat AI Tailored for Local Needs



https://propakistani.pk/2025/03/22/pakistan-launches-its-first-home...


Pakistan has achieved a notable milestone in the tech sector with the beta launch of Zahanat AI, the nation’s first locally developed artificial intelligence chatbot. Spearheaded by entrepreneur Mehwish Salman Ali, co-founder and CEO of Data Vault and Zahanat AI, the platform promises to address Pakistan’s unique challenges with culturally sensitive and locally relevant solutions.

Zahanat AI is the culmination of years of development, operating from a dedicated data center in Karachi since 2022. This means that the AI model’s data stays in Pakistan for processing and doesn’t go anywhere else. This data center is connected with high-speed internet and has robust DDoS protection.

The system utilizes a mixed GPU architecture, leveraging both Nvidia GPUs and chips, initially incorporating used gaming GPUs to build its computational power. It was a relatively low-cost development project. The owners said that DeepSeek cost $5 million to make, but Zahanat AI cost less, without specifying exactly how much.



Mehwish Salman Ali said:

Our goal was to create an AI that understands and responds to the specific needs of Pakistan. Zahanat AI is trained on a massive dataset of 2 billion parameters, all processed and stored within Pakistan, ensuring cultural awareness and relevance.

A key distinguishing feature of Zahanat AI is its focus on ethical and responsible AI development. The platform is specifically trained to censor sensitive topics and avoid discussions about particular individuals.

The beta launch of Zahanat AI is currently on an invitational basis, requiring interested users to submit their email and personal details, including their profession, work email, and social media accounts. This selective access aims to gather valuable feedback and refine the platform before a wider public release.

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Ali further explained:

By training Zahanat AI on Pakistan’s data, we are building a tool that can provide Pakistan-focused solutions to the diverse problems faced by our communities. We believe this technology has the potential to transform various sectors, from education and healthcare to business and governance.

For now, the beta launch has introduced Zahanat AI’s initial Z1 model, with plans to improve and expand further in the future with Z2 and so on. The Z2 model will introduce multilingual support for all languages in Pakistan and will get voice input as well.