Altman clarified that his response had been taken out of context, emphasizing that he was specifically addressing the question of competing with OpenAI with a mere $10 million investment
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has responded to a video shared by CP Gurnani, the Managing Director & Chief Executive Officer of Tech Mahindra, in which Altman can be heard stating that India’s chances of developing a ChatGPT-like tool were “hopeless.”
Gurnani was quick to share Altman’s reply on Twitter, expressing his acceptance of the challenge presented. He conveyed his determination to prove Altman’s statement wrong. “OpenAI founder Sam Altman said it’s pretty hopeless for Indian companies to try and compete with them. Dear @sama, From one CEO to another.. CHALLENGE ACCEPTED,” he tweeted.
Altman clarified that his response had been taken out of context, emphasising that he was specifically addressing the question of competing with OpenAI with a mere $10 million investment. He maintained that attempting to rival OpenAI under such circumstances would prove challenging.
Nevertheless, Altman encouraged Indian startups to explore new avenues and contribute innovative ideas to the world, highlighting that they possess the potential to accomplish groundbreaking achievements. He expressed his confidence in the ability of Indian startups to undertake such endeavors and stressed that only the builders themselves could answer the question of what they could uniquely contribute.
“Thank you for clarifying. Point taken,” Gurnani replied to Altman on Twitter.
The incident took place during an event organized by The Economic Times, where Altman was questioned by Rajan Anandan, a former Vice President of Google in India and South East Asia, and current venture capitalist. Anandan inquired whether India had the capability to develop an artificial intelligence tool like ChatGPT, prompting Altman’s response.
Altman explained that OpenAI’s perspective on the matter involved conveying the difficulty of competing with them in training foundational models, while simultaneously encouraging others to attempt it regardless. He maintained his belief that such competition would be quite challenging, characterizing it as “pretty hopeless.”
“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 to try anyway. And I believe both of those things. I think it is pretty hopeless,” Altman said.
Meanwhile, Gurnani told Business Today about some of their work at Tech Mahindra revolving around AI. “At Tech Mahindra, we started working on Generative AI around 2015-16 with one of our first IP created in the media domain called Storicool. An auto content creation platform, it was beyond its years. Since then, we have launched a suite of AI offerings for enterprises to help them in their digital acceleration journeys. We were also among the first IT services company whose chatbot, developed by makers lab, became the 51 most credible chatbots (in the era of chatbots) in 2016,” he said.