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

00:00excitement here has just been incredible to watch. Uh, and it's not just ChatGPT, Codex is the fastest growing Codex market in the world now, too. Um, but the energy here and what people are building is, uh, is remarkable. >> Okay. And in terms of, uh, the the potential of this market, I know you've got the the Go plan here, uh, a low-cost plan. How do you plan to sort of monetize people in this market as well as you continue to expand here? >> Uh, Go is one thing that we're we really designed with India in mind. It's a market that clearly needed it. Um, and the enterprise adoption, I think, will be another very strong angle. >> In terms of the infrastructure front, you have this partnership with Tata as

00:36well, uh, and the data center. Also wanted to get your take on what the plans are for Stargate in the India market. Um, when is that happening? I think we had the IT minister this week speaking and saying it's happening. Uh, can you give us some updates on that? >> We are working, uh, as hard and as fast as we can to build sufficient AI infrastructure in India to serve the market here. Um, it's going pretty well. I don't know the exact timelines on every project, but, uh, the country here is motivated to build fast. >> Do you think we'll get something this year? >> I hope so. >> Hm. Sam, on on terms of AI competition, we know it's intense. There's a there's a ton of players and and there's a lot

01:11of competition on the frontier at this point. Last year you issued this this code red, uh, around the competition. Do you feel you're in a much better place now than you were, say, last back in the last year? >> Um, yeah, ChatGPT has been growing very strongly, uh, and I feel great about the current models, the upcoming models. It's been very fun to see the momentum with Codex as a new product. Like, ChatGPT is great, uh, but, you know, always expected that to do well. The strength, uh, of Codex winning the coding market, uh, has been a new and really fun thing to watch. >> And and in the enterprise specifically, I mean, you go up there against Anthropic, for example. Um, the competition Are you managing to gain

01:48customers? Co-work, there was a big deal made out of that. >> Yeah. >> And the impact it's having. Um, >> Um, I think most of the enterprise momentum right now is still, honestly, around coding, but I I hope and expect that over this coming year we'll start to see it for knowledge work more generally. >> When you start to think about revenue as well, Sam, ads, this is a new area you've only just started them. What has been the initial feedback so far? >> So it's super early and I always hesitate to talk when something's this early, but the anecdotally the feedback has been pretty positive. I think we still have some work to do to figure out the exact ad format um that's going to work the best, but

02:25people have are like, oh, this is like, you know, a cool thing. The The ads that I have personally liked the most in recent years from tech have been sort of Instagram style ads um where you discover something new that you might really like and otherwise wouldn't have known about. I think we've got a real opportunity to push in that direction with ads in ChatGPT. >> When you say there's some stuff to figure out, what are the things that you hope to make improvements on? >> Oh, we're still just like testing very different formats, you know, where and how should an ad show up uh like that kind of tactical stuff. >> It is it something for I know it's super early stage, but how much are you thinking about taking this to other

03:00markets outside the US? >> Eventually we want to, but I don't know any kind of timeline there. >> Uh another big potential new revenue driver in the future for you, Sam, is around hardware. I know you've got Jony Ive on the team. Is there anything you can tease out at this point around what you're working on? >> One of the powerful things about AI is how much context it can handle and an AI that and we see a little bit of this with uh Open uh an AI that can get to know more and more about you can give you better and better products and services and we'd like to build a hardware that can do that very well in the virtual and the physical world. >> Not a smartphone? >> [laughter] >> Um the other part of the hardware

03:41equation as well is is semiconductors, an incredibly important part of the data center, incredibly important part of what you do in terms of training and inference, etc. Uh semiconductors is an area I believe you are investing in and trying to figure out your own kind of product. What does that look like now? Is this going to be something you can train on as well as inference? >> Um we we will have a rich portfolio of semiconductor approaches. We will partner with uh you know, the sort of giants of the field like Nvidia. We'll partner with newer startups in areas like fast inference like Cerebras. We'll do our own inference chip as well. Um we we expect this to have this to need more of a portfolio of

04:24solutions than maybe we initially thought, but we're very excited with our own work here. >> So, we're not talking just one kind of processor like a T like Google's gone with the TPU. We're talking potentially a multiple portfolio of semiconductors out of Open AI. >> Yeah, I mean Google has the TPU. They also buy Nvidia chips and I believe some others too and I think you should expect the same from us. >> Um financing has been a big focus. I know you're currently undergoing potentially more than a hundred billion dollar round at this point. Are you close to closing that? >> Uh if I were as you know, like legally I would not be allowed to talk about that. >> Uh just in terms of financing though, there has been a lot

04:56of concern about the way artificial intelligence has been being financed. Terms like circular financing have been thrown around. Vendor financing as well giving the fact that you buy chips from Nvidia invested in you as well. Um there is also concern that if there is a failure at some point in this chain, this could have knock-on effects on companies like Open AI. Are you concerned about that? >> I don't agree with the first part of the concern. I do agree with the second part. Um new revenue has got to come into this system. Like people can invest in each other and buy each other's stuff whatever, but if there's not new revenue coming in, that's when you get into there's like nothing here. But, revenue

05:30is growing so fast not just for us, but the whole ecosystem that there there's like a massive amount of revenue coming in to support all of this infrastructure. So, I don't worry about that part. Um in terms of any one layer of the stack failing would cause some real knock-on effects and it's sort of like a very tight supply chain right now. I do worry about that. >> In terms of not being able to get access to certain technologies, like chips? >> If yeah, something like that. >> Yeah. Uh the other part of the concern, some have criticized the valuation OpenAI has got and said, "Well, you know, there's intense competition. We've seen things like the deep seek moment can can disrupt markets uh as well." Um

06:06your valuation, do you think it's justified? >> I think so. The revenue that that's up to other that's like up to a market to decide that. I think so. >> to profitability eventually, what does that look like for OpenAI? >> Uh we are growing at a extremely fast rate uh right now. I think as long as we can have reasonable unit economics, we should focus on continuing to grow faster and faster. Um and we'll get profitable when we think we when we think it makes sense. >> Sam, just a very quick final one China. Um we had an analyst on CNBC the other day saying that China techs tech shock is just getting started that in 5 to 10 years time, most of the world could be running on the China tech stack. Demis

06:47Hassabis was speaking to me very recently saying China is just months behind in terms of its ability to bring out models. Just in the past 2 weeks, we've seen a ton of interesting models out of China on on video, on physical AI. Um are Chinese companies' progress being underestimated right now? Do you feel that they're that close as Demis says? >> I don't know about being underestimated, but certainly the progress of Chinese tech companies across the entire stack and also not just in AI, but in many fields is remarkable. Um the reason I'm pushing back on underestimated is it feels like every conversation I have is like, "Oh, China's beating us. What do we do about it?" So, I think people are aware of

07:26what's happening there, but uh yes, Chinese progress is amazingly fast. >> Are they are they near the frontier? Are they are they near you? >> Uh in some areas, yes, and in some areas, no. It's not quite a unilateral thing like that.