OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has publicly lauded India for its adoption of AI and other evolving technologies. On Wednesday, Altman took to X to share his thoughts:
“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!”
OpenAI, one of the heavy hitters in artificial intelligence research and development, has recently hit a milestone of 500 million weekly users around the world. This comes as its popular AI service ChatGPT unveiled an image generation feature in GPT-4o which led to the viral “Ghibli” trend – users used ChatGPT to generate any images or photographs into the art style of Japanese animation studio Studio Ghibli.
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The viral trend gained so much momentum that Altman had to impose a rate limit on image generation requests, saying that their “GPUs are melting.”
prompt: sam altman as a cricket player in anime style pic.twitter.com/kgflS6dT6o
— Sam Altman (@sama) April 2, 2025
In another X post, Altman joined in on the trend by sharing a Ghibli-style picture of himself as an Indian cricket player. This probably came in response to Indian cricket player Sachin Tendulkar who had previously posted an AI-generated anime-style photo of himself to which Altman had responded, “want to play?”
AI-sa kuch trend ho raha hai, maine suna. Toh socha, what if Ghibli made cricket? pic.twitter.com/NdKptwOliM
— Sachin Tendulkar (@sachin_rt) March 27, 2025
Speculation swirls around why Altman chose to single out India to turn his sights on. One of the reasons could be what he had said the last time he was in India. In February, Altman visited India, where he had a fireside chat with India’s IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw and during that time, the OpenAI CEO said that India was the company’s second biggest market. Altman also revealed that the company had tripled its user base in India in just one year.
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Additionally, OpenAI is reportedly in talks with Reliance Industries to integrate ChatGPT and other AI tools into its businesses, particularly through Jio’s telecom services. The company is also considering reducing ChatGPT’s subscription price in India by 85% to attract more paid users.
OpenAI has been making headlines recently with its historic $40 billion funding round that valued the AI firm at $300 billion.