India could be a different kind of AI superpower
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Artificial intelligence (AI) is taking off in India. The country is now the second-largest market for OpenAI, whose ChatGPT service has 700m active users worldwide.
Anthropic, another AI startup, also counts India as its second-largest market by usage. That reflects not just India’s huge population but also its appetite for new technology. According to BCG, a consultancy, 92% of Indian office workers regularly use AI tools, compared with 64% in America.
In contrast to rich countries, a large majority of Indians believe AI’s benefits outweigh its risks. The enthusiasm has been boosted by the “blitzscaling" tactics of Silicon Valley firms. OpenAI is selling access to a chatbot in India for a fifth of the price of its cheapest American plan.
Grok, from Elon Musk’s startup, xAI, is priced at a quarter of its American rate. Perplexity, a generative-AI upstart, has made its service free for a year to all 360m users of Airtel, a big Indian mobile operator. Even in India, however, the boom in AI causes anxiety.
The country’s youth-unemployment rate stands at 16%. Jobs in manufacturing have grown far less than had been hoped, in part because of rising automation—a trend that AI threatens to accelerate. White-collar work is starting to look wobbly, too.
Tata Consultancy Services, India’s biggest IT-services firm, recently said that it would cut 12,000 staff in order to become “future ready". Jefferies, an investment bank, predicts that more IT firms will follow. A second fear is foreign domination.
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