Unicorns, startup discuss with Altman ways to cut cost of AI model, India's data sovereignty
Altman notes change in the price of foundational models has come down dramatically and this will lead to an influx of several AI models on his second visit to India.
Unicorns and startups on Wednesday met OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and discussed ways to lower the cost of AI model and data sovereignty.
Paytm CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma said during the discussion, apart from lowering cost of AI, there was an understanding seen among industry players that there should be a sovereign AI model for India and data should be kept within the country's boundary.
When asked about the change that he has seen during this second visit of Altman to India, he said that the price of foundational models has come down dramatically and this will lead to an influx of several AI models.
"Sam has also said that there will be a 10x reduction in price. The benchmark price for AI is very low compared to last year. I feel that industry at large has an understanding of India's sovereign AI, sovereign data and used cases should be kept within Indian boundaries. Discussions took place on this as well," Shekhar told PTI after a round-table with Altman.
Expertia AI Founder Akshay Gugnani said that during the meeting Altman said that OpenAI is evaluating the option of open source but did not say no to it.
China's AI platform DeepSeek has launched an AI platform on an open source model which is free to use and allows anybody to develop technology solutions on it while OpenAI is a proprietary and for profit entity.
"Our ask with OpenAI was very clear: to have an open and collaborative environment, work with them to fine-tune our model for our industry. We are looking at them having an open source model like DeepSeek and Llama which can be leveraged by our teams," Gugnani said.
When asked if OpenAI assured them of coming up with an open source model, Gugnani said "No, but Sam did mention that they are looking at options for it but he didn't say no to it."
Drizz Co-Founder Asad Abrar said that OpenAI models are 75-80% accurate and for companies building applications on top of them need to do the rest of the fine-tuning.
Abrar said that one of the key asks of his startup is to provide local access to OpenAI features at the same time at which they are available in the US because even a two weeks delay in the AI world can cost companies significantly.
Abrar said that DeepSeek is proving to be a tough competition for OpenAI.
"As founders in the startup model, we expect the cost of AI models to come down. They may not want to do it (open source) because that breaks their pricing monopoly but I think that market will dictate them to drive their pricing down and there will be some aspect of open source model from OpenAI as well. I am really hopeful we will see some work on open source models," he said.
Snapdeal and Titan Capital Co-founder Kunal Bahl said that there was a closed room discussion but it seems that the OpenAI team is very excited about the India opportunity and wants to see their technology can be better leveraged by Indian entities.
Edited by Megha Reddy