Sam Altman predicts India to be OpenAI's largest market amid ChatGPT-5 release

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has predicted that India could become the artificial intelligence (AI) giant's largest market worldwide.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he was excited to visit India in September and that his company was especially focused on bringing its product to the country.(AFP File)

Altman’s statement came as OpenAI launched its next-generation model, ChatGPT-5. India is currently the company's second-largest market behind the United States. The CEO called the Indians ‘remarkable’ in their use of AI.

"India is our second-largest market in the world after the US, and it may well become our largest market. It's incredibly fast-growing, but what users are doing with AI, what citizens of India are doing with AI, is really quite remarkable,” Altman said during a media briefing.

The OpenAI CEO said he was excited to visit India in September and that his company was especially focused on bringing its product to the country.

"We're especially focused on bringing products to India, working with local partners to make AI work great for India and make it more affordable for people across the country. We've been paying a lot of attention here given the rate of growth, and I am excited to come for a visit in September," he said.

OpenAI launches ChatGPT-5

OpenAI on Thursday announced the launch of GPT-5, describing it as its “best model yet for coding and agentic tasks".

"We’re releasing GPT-5 in three sizes in the API -- gpt-5, gpt-5-mini, and gpt-5-nano -- to give developers more flexibility to trade off performance, cost, and latency. While GPT-5 in ChatGPT is a system of reasoning, non-reasoning, and router models, GPT-5 in the API platform is the reasoning model that powers maximum performance in ChatGPT. Notably, GPT-5 with minimal reasoning is a different model from the non-reasoning model in ChatGPT, and is better tuned for developers. The non-reasoning model used in ChatGPT is available as gpt-5-chat-latest," OpenAI said in a blog post.

Nick Turley, head of ChatGPT, added that the new model significantly improves understanding across more than 12 Indian languages.

"GPT-5 significantly improves multilingual understanding across over 12 Indian languages, including regional languages. So that's really exciting because as Sam mentioned, India is a priority market for us," Turley said.

The rollout of GPT-5 began on August 7 for free, Plus, and Pro users, with Enterprise and Education users gaining access a week later.