OpenAI chief Sam Altman wants to play cricket with Indian batting legend Sachin Tendulkar. A few days ago, Tendulkar shared Ghibli-style images of himself from the 2011 World Cup victory alongside the trophy. Altman replied, “want to play?”
He even shared his own Ghibli-style artwork, depicting himself playing cricket in an Indian jersey.
Since OpenAI launched image generation in GPT-4o, social media platforms like X and Instagram have been flooded with Ghibli-style images. Users have been sharing their personal photos in anime style, making it a viral trend.
“The ChatGPT launch 26 months ago was one of the craziest viral moments I’d ever seen, and we added one million users in five days. We added one million users in the last hour,” Altman said in a post on X.
India emerged as one of the largest user bases for this trend, catching even Altman’s attention. “What’s happening with AI adoption in India right now is amazing to watch. We love to see the explosion of creativity—India is outpacing the world,” Altman wrote in a post on X.
Notably, the image generation capability is rolled to free users as well.
It seems that OpenAI is now aggressively targeting the Indian market, as India is the second-largest user base of ChatGPT. Altman also shared Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Ghibli-style images featuring the Indian flag on X.
OpenAI is also reportedly in talks with Reliance Industries about a potential partnership to integrate ChatGPT and other AI tools into the latter’s businesses. The Sam Altman-led company is seeking to leverage Reliance’s businesses, such as wireless carrier Jio, to distribute or sell its AI services, possibly including ChatGPT.
The startup has considered reducing ChatGPT’s subscription price in India by as much as 85% to attract more paid users. Currently priced at $20 per month, the subscription is costly relative to India’s median salary. A potential partnership with Jio, Reliance’s telecom subsidiary, could allow ChatGPT to be bundled into mobile plans at a lower rate.
OpenAI recently raised $40 billion at a $300 billion post-money valuation. The company stated that this funding will help push the frontiers of AI research, scale compute infrastructure, and deliver increasingly powerful tools for the 500 million people who use ChatGPT every week.
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