BBC News, Mumbai
Getty ImagesIndia is a cricket-crazy nation, and it seems the AI chatbot ChatGPT hasn’t missed that fact.
So, when its founder Sam Altman fed it the prompt: “Sam Altman as a cricket player in anime style”, the bot seems to have immediately generated an image of Altman wielding a bat in a bright blue India jersey.
Altman shared his anime cricketer avatar on X on Thursday, sending Indian social media users into a tizzy.
Though the tech billionaire had shared AI-generated images before – joining last week’s viral Studio Ghibli trend – it was the India jersey that got people talking.
While some Indian users said they were delighted to see Altman sporting their team’s colours, many were quick to speculate about his motives behind sharing the image.
“Sam trying hard to attract Indian customers,” one user said.
“Now awaiting your India announcement. How much are you allocating out of that $40bn to India,” another user asked, alluding to the record funding recently secured by Altman for his firm, OpenAI, which owns ChatGPT.
Sam Altman/TwitterYet another user put into words a pattern he seemed to have spotted in Altman’s recent social media posts – and a question that seems to be on many Indian users’ minds.
“Over the past few days, you’ve been praising India and Indian customers a lot. How did this sudden love for India come about? It feels like there’s some deep strategy going on behind the scenes,” he wrote on X.
While the comment may sound a bit conspiratorial, there’s some truth to at least part of it.
Just hours before Altman shared his image in the cricket jersey, he’d shared a post on X praising India’s adoption of AI technology. He said it was “amazing to watch” and that it was “outpacing the world”.
This post too went viral in India, while the media wrote numerous stories documenting users’ reactions to it.
Someone even started a Reddit thread which quite comically aired the Redditor’s curiosity, and perhaps, confusion.
“Can someone tell me what Sam Altman is talking about here in his tweet?” the person posted on Reddit sharing Altman’s post.
A few days earlier, Altman had retweeted Studio Ghibli-style images of Prime Minister Narendra Modi which were shared by the federal government’s citizen engagement platform.
All these posts of Altman have generated a fair amount of comments questioning his motives.
The scepticism around Altman’s perceived courting of India could be because of his past views on the country’s AI capabilities.
During a visit in 2023, he had sounded almost dismissive of small Indian start-ups making AI tools that could compete with OpenAI’s creations.
Asked at a event how a small, smart team with a low budget of about $10m could build substantial AI foundational models, he answered that it would be “totally hopeless” to attempt this but that entrepreneurs should try anyway.
But when Altman visited India again this year, he had changed his tune.
In a meeting with federal minister Ashwini Vaishnaw in February, Altman expressed an eagerness to collaborate with India on making low-cost AI models.
He also praised India for its swift pace of adopting AI technologies and revealed that the country was OpenAI’s second-largest market, with users tripling over the past year.
MyGovIndia/TwitterThe praise comes even as his company is locked in a legal battle with some of India’s biggest news media companies over the alleged unauthorised use of their content.
Experts say that Altman’s seemingly newfound affinity for India might have to do with the country’s profitability as a market.
According to the International Trade Administration, the AI market in India is projected to reach $8bn by 2025, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of over 40% from 2020 to 2025.
Nikhil Pahwa, founder-editor of MediaNama.com, a technology policy website, says that when it comes to founders of AI companies making “grand statements” about India, it has much to do with the country’s massive user base. He adds that Altman isn’t the only CEO wooing India.
In January, Aravind Srinivas, founder of Perplexity, an AI search engine, also expressed an eagerness to work with Indian AI start-ups.
Mr Srinivas said in a post on X that he was ready to invest $1m and five hours of his time per week to “make India great again in the context of AI”.
Technology writer Prasanto K Roy believes that the Ghibli-trend revealed India’s massive userbase for ChatGPT and, potentially, other AI platforms as well. And with competitor AI models like Gemini and Grok quickly gaining Indian users, Altman may be keen to retain existing users of his firm’s services and also acquire new ones, he says.
“India is a very large client base for all global AI foundational models and with ChatGPT being challenged by the much cheaper DeepSeek AI, Altman is likely eager to acquire more Indian customers and keep Indian developers positively aligned towards building on top of OpenAI’s services,” Mr Pahwa says.
“So when it comes to these grand overtures towards India, there’s no real love; it’s just business,” he adds.
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