Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw meets OpenAI’s Sam Altman, discuss collaboration

IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw met OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and discussed India’s strategy of creating the entire AI stack – GPUs, model, and apps.

The minister wrote on X that Altman was willing to collaborate with India on all three.

The minister further said that the OpenAI CEO appreciated Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision of democratising technology.

During the meeting with Altman, Vaishnaw while referring to Chandrayaan 3 mission apprised Altman on how India had sent a mission to the moon at a fraction of the cost that many other countries did.

“Why can’t we do a model which will be a fraction of the cost that many other countries do? So yes, innovation will bring that cost down,” he asked, commiting to build a lost-cost AI model.

Within the applications in healthcare, in education, in agriculture, in weather forecasting, in disaster management, in transportation, multiple different things India is working on, he said.

During the meeting, which had many startups in audience, Vaishnaw requested the startup community to come up with unique solutions.

The Minister shared a clip of his interaction with Altman and the startup group. In the video the minister said, “We are very soon starting a kind of open competition (for AI).”

Earlier, speaking at the India Today-Business Today Budget Roundtable, the minister said India will have its first foundational Artificial Intelligence model in at maximum 10 months from now.

The government is going to host an open source model like Chinese ‘DeepSeek’ on Indian servers. This comes at a time when Chinese startup has challenged the AI world. He had said India has already approved the AI mission last year, with about Rs 10,000 crore allocation.

Asserting that the AI as a technology has just begun, the minister said the amount of innovations that one would see going ahead is going to be phenomenal.

Given India’s strong IT industry and a large set of data, AI-based utilities can leverage huge potential in the country. Though AI is still in its early stages.

Many nations the world over have been using AI technologies for better service delivery and to reduce human intervention but fears of job cuts remain as the technology evolves.