A source with direct knowledge tells me exclusively that OpenAI is also teaming up with ex-Twitter India head Rishi Jaitly as its senior advisor for facilitating talks with the government around AI policy, and so on. And OpenAI is of course looking to set up a local team in India.

Rishi Jaitly has been helping OpenAI navigate the Indian policy and regulatory landscape, people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.

OpenAI doesn't currently have an official presence in India, except for a trademark granted this month. However, OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman met Prime Minister Narendra Modi of New Delhi during his world tour in June. After meeting him, Altman said he had a great conversation with Modi. Neither the company nor Altman, though, issued any statements during his two-day visit.

It is unclear whether he is employed by OpenAI; at the very least, he's been taking a role from which he advises the company on how to establish connections in India. The two sources who informed TechCrunch said it started sometime after Altman's visit to New Delhi.

Between 2007 and 2009, Jaitly was heading the public-private partnership of Google in India. In 2012, he moved to Twitter, rebranding X. According to his profile on LinkedIn, Jaitly was the first employee of the company in the country.

He then rose to VP for the APAC and MENA region. In late 2016, Jaitly stepped down from Twitter and became the co-founder and CEO of Times Bridge, the international investment arm of Indian media giant The Times Group. The investments of Times Bridge include Uber, Airbnb, Coursera, Mubi, Smule and Wattpad. Jaitly has also resigned from the company in 2022.
OpenAI and Jaitly did not respond to requests for comment.

Anna Makanju, global affairs vice president at OpenAI, will headline the agenda alongside other industry leaders and global politicians during this year's Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence summit scheduled next week in Delhi. She is expected to feature during the session known as "Collaborative AI for Global Partnership (CAIGP) – Global Cooperation for Equitable AI." Sources in the investment firm told TechCrunch that Jaitly had helped organize the participation by Makanju at the event.

The leadership of OpenAI has been on a roller coaster in recent weeks. First, CEO Altman and board president Greg Brockman were abruptly ousted from the company. The duo jumped ship for a hot minute to join Microsoft before returning to OpenAI with a reconstituted board.

At an event hosted by Times Group in New Delhi during his June visit, Altman responded to a question about building foundational models with a $10 million budget. It's "hopeless," he said. (OpenAI has raised a bit more itself — over $11 billion to date — to build its foundational models.)

His comments drew flak from some Indian entrepreneurs, but later Altman clarified that his words were taken out of context and that he himself had never said that it is not possible to compete with the likes of OpenAI if that is the budget.

What one can do that's never been done before, contribute a new thing to the world, he said in a post on X. I have no doubt Indian startups can and will do that, he said in a post on X.

That's really taken out of context! The question was competing with us with $10 million, which I really do think is not going to work. But I still said try! However, it's the wrong question.

— Sam Altman (@sama) June 10, 2023

Critics described India as heavily lagging behind in AI development, not least because of funding. This piece in September said that India's AI startups have raised around $4 billion, big number until you consider the $50 billion that has been poured into the ecosystem in India's great rival, China; or the $11 billion+ that OpenAI alone has raised (along with the billions more picked up by other large players, and of course the money Big Tech is putting into this).

More sympathetic, perhaps, is that India's AI development is still nascent and that the few startups, like Sarvam—which raised $41 million recently from investors that include Lightspeed, Peak XV, and Khosla Ventures—is simply at the beginning of laying down those foundational models.

While more than 1,500 AI-based startups in India have raised over $4 billion funding, India is still losing the battle on innovation in AI, analysts at Sanford C. Bernstein said in a note.

That leaves a huge gap for companies like OpenAI. India, the world's most populous country, and the second-biggest internet market after China, with over 880 million users, presents the opportunity for growth. Altman hinted at the company's interest in the country during his June visit to the engineering college IIIT Delhi.

"It really is amazing to watch what's happening in India with the embrace of AI — not just OpenAI but other technologies, too," he said at the time.

That said, the company hasn't yet announced any investment in the country (besides a trademark).

It may not be a swift step, though. An OpenAI investor told TechCrunch that the company is indeed eyeing India as its key market and is mulling opportunities to build up 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 in the company’s way. And so working on the regulatory front may be the first and most important efforts it can be making right now.

For now the task may be more about understanding what direction things will be moving in coming years.

Indian government officials have made it clear this year that they are not interested in imposing heavy regulations over AI development. The Minister of State for IT, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, has been repeatedly advocating for international cooperation toward developing a framework on regulations on AI, including "guardrails of safety and trust.".

We are very committed to AI," he said at the Global Technology Summit in New Delhi earlier this week, hosted by Carnegie India and India's external affairs ministry. "We certainly are focused on using AI in real-life use cases and our prime minister is absolutely a believer that technology can transform the lives of people, make governments deliver more, deliver faster, deliver better.". And so AI is going to be for us used to build models and build capabilities that are aimed at real-life use cases."

Unlike OpenAI, its biggest investor and strategic partner Microsoft — which now has an observer seat on the board — has a strong hold in India. The software giant, which set up its local presence in the Indian market way back in 1990, has one of its biggest R&D centers outside its Redmond headquarters in Bengaluru, and three data centers across the country. It employs more than 20,000 people across 10 Indian cities. The company is also an active investor in Indian startups.

We have reached out to OpenAI for comment and will update this post when and if they respond.