India has all ingredients to be a full-stack AI leader: Sam Altman

New Delhi: India has "all the ingredients to be a full-stack AI leader", Sam Altman said ahead of his visit to the country for the Global AI Impact Summit, citing its tech talent, national strategy and optimism about the technology's potential.

Calling India the world's largest democracy, OpenAI CEO wrote in The Times of India that the country combines homegrown expertise with a policy push to deploy AI at scale.

Referring to the government's IndiaAI Mission, he said it is designed to expand compute capacity, support startups and accelerate multilingual applications in healthcare, agriculture and public services to ensure AI becomes "an essential tool for hundreds of millions of people across India".

Altman noted India's rapid adoption of AI tools, saying the country now has "100 million weekly active users", the second-largest base after the US.

India also has "the largest number of students on ChatGPT worldwide" and ranks fourth globally in the use of Prism, OpenAI's free research and collaboration tool.

"India, the world's largest democracy, has all the ingredients to be a full-stack AI leader: optimism about what AI can do for the country, homegrown tech talent, and a national strategy for how to incorporate the technology more widely," he wrote.

He stressed that widening AI's benefits requires progress on "access, adoption, and agency".

"Access is the admission ticket; without it, people and institutions cannot participate fully in the AI era. Adoption is putting AI to work in classrooms, workplaces, and public services. Agency is what turns access and adoption into impact by giving people the ability and confidence to use AI to learn faster, build more, and make better decisions," he said.

"When the three align, more people can participate not just as users of AI, but as builders and beneficiaries of the growth it enables." Warning against uneven gains, Altman said, "If AI access and adoption are uneven, AI's upside will be uneven, too", and added that a "capability overhang" risks concentrating productivity and economic gains if left unaddressed.

"OpenAI is committed to doing its part to help build AI in India, with India, and for India," he said, adding that the company has made its tools available for free to widen access.

He outlined three priorities: scaling AI literacy, building computing and energy infrastructure, and integrating AI into real workflows.

"Infrastructure is destiny," he said.

Stressing safeguards, Altman added, "None of this works without trust," and said, "If we want AI to expand opportunity, safety and reliability have to keep pace with capability".

Altman said OpenAI recently brought together more than 200 nonprofit leaders across four Indian cities to help them use ChatGPT, opened its first office in Delhi last August and plans to expand further this year.

"We will soon be announcing new ways of partnering with the Indian government to put access to AI and its benefits within reach for more people across the country," he said.

"AI will help define India's future, and India will help define AI's future. And it will do so in a way only a democracy can," Altman added.