Watch CNBC's full interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman from the India AI Summit

India market and infrastructure

• Altman describes the excitement in India as incredible, noting Codex is the fastest growing Codex market in the world.
• The Go plan was designed with India in mind, and enterprise adoption is expected to be another strong monetization angle.
• OpenAI is working as fast as it can to build sufficient AI infrastructure in India, including a Tata data center partnership; on Stargate in India, Altman says the country is motivated to build fast and he hopes for something this year.

Competition and enterprise

• Asked about last year's code red, Altman says ChatGPT is growing strongly and he feels great about current and upcoming models.
• Codex winning the coding market has been a new and fun thing to watch; most enterprise momentum is still around coding, but he expects knowledge work more generally over the coming year.

Ads and hardware

• Ads are super early, but anecdotal feedback is positive; OpenAI is still testing formats and where ads should show up.
• Altman likes Instagram-style discovery ads and sees a real opportunity to push that direction in ChatGPT; international expansion of ads will come eventually with no timeline.
• On hardware with Jony Ive, Altman says AI that can handle more context can offer better products and services, and they want hardware that does that in the virtual and physical world.

Semiconductors and financing

• OpenAI will have a rich portfolio of semiconductor approaches: partnering with giants like Nvidia, newer startups like Cerebras for fast inference, and its own inference chip.
• Altman compares this to Google, which has the TPU but also buys Nvidia chips.
• He declines to comment on the reported funding round, but dismisses circular financing concerns since new revenue is growing fast across the ecosystem; however, he does worry that a failure in one layer of the tight supply chain, such as chip access, could cause knock-on effects.
• He believes OpenAI's valuation is justified and says the company will focus on fast growth and become profitable when it makes sense.

China

• Altman calls Chinese tech progress across the entire stack remarkably fast, though he pushes back on the word underestimated since everyone is already talking about it.
• Chinese companies are near the frontier in some areas but not others; it is not a unilateral situation.