OpenAI is teaming up with former Twitter India head Rishi Jaitly as a senior adviser to facilitate talks with the government on AI policy, TechCrunch has learned exclusively. OpenAI is also trying to build a local team in India.
People familiar with the matter told TechCrunch that Jaitly is helping OpenAI navigate the Indian policy and regulatory landscape.
OpenAI currently has no official presence in India (apart from a trademark, approved earlier this month). However, OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman visited New Delhi during his world tour in June and met Prime Minister Narendra Modi. After his meeting, Altman said he had a big talk with Modi. Still, neither Altman nor the company made any announcements during his two-day visit.
It is unclear whether Jaitly is officially employed by OpenAI, but he has taken on a role advising the company on how to build connections in India. He started playing the role sometime after Altman visited New Delhi, two sources told TechCrunch.
Between 2007 and 2009, Jaitly served as head of public-private partnerships for Google in India before moving to Twitter (now called X) in 2012. He was the company’s first employee in the country, according to LinkedIn Profile.
He was later elevated to vice president for the APAC and MENA region. In late 2016, Jaitly left Twitter to become the co-founder and CEO of Times Bridge, the global investment arm of Indian media giant The Times Group. Times Bridge’s portfolio includes Uber, Airbnb, Coursera, Mubi, Smule and Wattpad. Jaitly left the company in 2022.
OpenAI and Jaitly did not respond to requests for comment.
OpenAI’s vice president of global affairs, Anna Makanju, is is scheduled to speak at the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence Summit in Delhi next week, along with other industry experts and international politicians. It will be part of the session titled “Collaborative Artificial Intelligence for Global Partnership (CAIGP) – Global Partnership for Equitable Artificial Intelligence”. Sources told TechCrunch that Jaitly helped set up Makanju’s participation in the event.
Rishi Jaitly. Image Credits: Mobile Global Esports
In recent weeks, OpenAI’s leadership has been on a rollercoaster ride. First, Altman and board chairman Greg Brockman were abruptly ousted from the company. The duo joined Microsoft for a hot minute before returning to OpenAI with a refreshed slate.
At an event organized by the Times Group in New Delhi during his visit in June, Altman answered a question about building basic models on a $10 million budget. It’s “hopeless,” he said. (OpenAI has raised a bit more of the same—over $11 billion to date—to build its foundational models.)
His comments struck a chord with some reactions from Indian businessmenbut Altman later clarified that his words were taken out of context and that he meant that it is difficult to compete with the likes of OpenAI on such a budget.
“The right question is what can a startup do that has never been done before, that will contribute a new thing to the world. I have no doubt that Indian startups can and will do this,” he said in a post on X.
Critics have is described India lags far behind in the world of AI development, mainly due to lack of funding. This piece in September noted that India’s AI startups have raised about $4 billion, which sounds like a big number until you consider the $50 billion that has poured into the ecosystem of India’s arch-rival China. or the $11B+ raised by OpenAI alone (along with the billions raised by other big players, and of course the money Big Tech is spending on it).
A more sympathetic view might be that AI development in India is still nascent, with some startups like Sarvam — which recently raised $41 million from investors like Lightspeed, Peak XV and Khosla Ventures — just getting started. to build fundamental models.
“While there are over 1,500 AI-based startups in India with over $4 billion in funding, India is still losing the AI innovation battle,” analysts at Sanford C. Bernstein said in a note.
This leaves a big gap for companies like OpenAI. India, the world’s most populous country and the second largest Internet market after China, with over 880 million users, presents an opportunity for growth. Altman hinted at the company’s interest in the country during his June visit to the IIIT Delhi engineering college.
“It’s really amazing to watch what’s happening in India with the embrace of AI — not just OpenAI but other technologies as well,” he said at the time.
That said, the company has yet to reveal any investment in the country (other than the brand).
And it may not be a quick move. An OpenAI investor told TechCrunch that the company considers India its core market and is looking to explore opportunities to grow its presence.
But with OpenAI’s leadership locked in, now with a more aligned board behind its bolder commercial push, regulation is really one of the last things facing the company. And so work on the regulatory front may be the first and most important effort it can make right now.
For now, the task may be more about understanding the direction things will move in the coming years.
Indian government officials have shown as much times this year they don’t want to put strict regulations around AI development. India’s IT Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar has repeatedly pushed For international cooperation to develop a framework for the regulation of artificial intelligence, with “safety and trust guardrails”.
“We are very committed to artificial intelligence,” he told the World Technology Summit in New Delhi earlier this week, organized by Carnegie India and India’s ministry of external affairs. “We’re certainly focused on using AI in real-life use cases, and our Prime Minister absolutely believes that technology can transform people’s lives, make governments deliver more, deliver faster, deliver better. And so AI will be used for us to build models and build capabilities that target real-world use cases.”
Unlike OpenAI, Microsoft’s biggest investor and strategic partner – which now has an observer seat on the board – has a strong presence in India. The software behemoth, which established its local presence in the Indian market in 1990, has one of the largest R&D centers out of its Redmond headquarters in Bangalore and three data centers across the country. It has over 20,000 employees across 10 cities in India. The company is also an active investor in Indian startups.
We’ve reached out to OpenAI for comment and will update this post when and if they respond.
