OpenAI Vice President Srinivas Narayanan praised Bhashini for resolving the language barrier at the Global India AI Summit's opening ceremony at Bharat Mandapam, New Delhi, on July 3, 2024. 

“Language barriers are one of the superpowers of large language models, and this is one area that we have been working on. We want to applaud the government’s Bhashini efforts,” he said.

OpenAI's Mission

Narayanan emphasized OpenAI's mission to build artificial general intelligence (AGI) that is safe and beneficial for all humanity. He highlighted his role in leading the engineering team responsible for developing products like ChatGPT and the developer APIs that support this mission. He stressed that OpenAI's efforts are collaborative, involving global partners, including those in India.

Engagement with India

Narayanan discussed OpenAI's growing engagement with India, noting visits from various OpenAI leaders, including CEO Sam Altman and Global VP of Affairs Ana McAndrews. He highlighted OpenAI's commitment to learning from India's innovative use of AI and integrating these insights into its global strategy. 

“India is already harnessing the power of AI and taking a long view of what might underlie an AI for our future as the world’s largest democracy seeks to realize further its development dreams of being a Viksit Bharat by the time it celebrates 100 years as an independent nation in 2047,” he said.

He also acknowledged the support of the Indian government, particularly the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, for its leadership in AI.

AI's Impact in India

Narayanan shared several themes on how India is harnessing AI in 2024:

• Entrepreneurial Ecosystem: AI has accelerated innovation in India's entrepreneurial ecosystem, reducing the cost of intelligence, enabling developers to write code efficiently, and creating conversational interfaces.
• Agriculture: AI supports farmers by providing timely, relevant advice through tools like Digital Green's Farmer Chat, built on GPT-4. This chatbot helps overcome language barriers and delivers agricultural assistance across many languages.
• Healthcare: AI aids healthcare delivery, exemplified by the company 10 Bed ICU, which uses AI to provide medical advice and serve more patients.
• Education: Personalized education at scale is a significant opportunity. Companies like Physics Wallah use products like ChatGPT to deliver tailored exam preparation to millions.

Commitment to India

Narayanan announced OpenAI's commitment to supporting India's AI mission, particularly in application development, ensuring that Indian developers can leverage OpenAI's models for social benefits at scale. Narayanan also said OpenAI is open to assisting India and its AI mission. 

“We are here to help India and its AI mission. We are excited about the application development initiative. OpenAI is ready to help in any possible way, whether providing access to models or more,” he added. He expressed enthusiasm for continuing engagement with the Indian government to maximize AI's value.

In his closing remarks, Narayanan emphasized AI's transformative potential, describing it as the most significant technological shift of our lifetimes. He underscored the importance of aligning AI with human values and safety and the opportunity to build new institutions to establish global norms and cooperation. 

“India has a unique approach to making technology beneficial for people through initiatives like the Digital Public Infrastructure, which has created transformative services like UPI. An ascendant India has an essential, leading role to play in developing these institutions,” he urged the government to participate in the discourse on advancing AI safety research.