OpenAI is looking to fund Indian startups: Sam Altman

OpenAI founder Sam Altman

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on June 8 said that the company is looking to fund Indian startups and has already held some discussions on the matter.

"We were always amazed by the quality of Indian startups. The energy we are seeing in Indian startups, we are looking to fund them... We had some conversations yesterday on funding startups in India," Altman said during a session at Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi.

During an interaction with students, Altman said that he had met Prime Minister Narendra Modi earlier in the day.

He added that the discussions touched upon framing global regulations for artificial intelligence and working with stakeholders in the country on using the technology for education.

When a student asked Altman about his advice to startups, he quipped that some of his suggestions to young companies when he was the head of Silicon Valley incubator Y Combinator (YC) had been proved wrong.

"I honestly feel so bad about the advice I gave at YC. I might even delete my blog. OpenAI raised a billion dollars even before launching a product... There is existential proof that my advice is not always accurate," he said.

"The thing we put on YC T-shirts 'make something people want' we took an unconventional path to reach it", he added.

Last month, OpenAI suggested in a blog post that countries should consider creating an international authority to track and regulate the development of advanced AI, similar to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for nuclear power.

Subsequently, the Indian government indicated that it has a different view on the matter currently and seeks to regulate AI only from the prism of user harm at the moment.

When asked if he had presented the idea to the heads of state he had met during his whirlwind world tour in the past couple of weeks, OpenAI chief said that the suggestion of an IAEA-like body had been well-received by governments.

He also argued that, contrary to the point that experts have made about the difficulty of tracking compute power in the same way as nuclear power, large AI systems can be tracked because building them requires huge resources.