India AI stack: Why Sam Altman’s visit to India matters

Just when an artificial intelligence (AI) war is raging, Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s chief Sam Altman is visiting India. Days after China’s low-cost DeepSeek artificial intelligence tool rattled the tech world a week ago by surpassing ChatGPT in popularity on Apple’s App Store in the US, OpenAI launched o3-mini, the most cost-efficient of its reasoning agents, which “advances the boundaries of what small models can achieve” as well as a ‘Deep Research’ tool with which ChatGPT can now carry out complex and multi-step research by parsing large amounts of online data. This is Altman’s first visit after 2023 when he met with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Altman’s visit to India, along with South Korea, Japan, the UAE, Germany and France, amid the turmoil in the AI world indicates OpenAI’s plan to partner with a large market where AI has yet to take root.