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Sources said that OpenAI executives have been holding talks with their Reliance counterparts in recent months for a potential product and sales partnership
As per a report, the Sam Altman-led company seeks to partner with Reliance’s telecom arm Jio to distribute or sell its AI offerings, including ChatGPT
The talks also saw Reliance, which also offers cloud, considering a proposal to sell OpenAI’s models to its enterprise customers through an API
Artificial intelligence (AI) giant OpenAI and social media major Meta are reportedly looking to strike partnership with Indian conglomerate Reliance on new AI businesses.
Sources told The Information that OpenAI executives have been holding talks with their Reliance counterparts in recent months for a potential product and sales partnership. As per the report, the Sam Altman-led company seeks to partner with Reliance’s telecom arm Jio to distribute or sell its AI offerings, including ChatGPT.
The talks reportedly saw Reliance, which also offers cloud, considering a proposal to sell OpenAI’s models to its enterprise customers through an application programming interface (API). However, the deal may see the involvement of Microsoft, which has the exclusive rights to resell OpenAI models to businesses through an API.
Meanwhile, a source also reportedly said that Meta Platforms has its own “ambitions” to work with Reliance on new AI businesses, without specifying what kind of AI-related product partnerships Meta had discussed with Reliance.
According to the report, top OpenAI executives internally told employees the company was looking at reducing the price of premium subscription of ChatGPT for Indian users to as low as “several dollars” instead of the current $20 per month. It was not clear if OpenAI discussed the price reduction idea with Reliance.
Sources also reportedly said that Reliance, which is developing one of the biggest data centers in Gujarat’s Jamnagar, has discussed the possibility of selling the data center capacity to OpenAI and Meta. Reliance is also said to have deliberated on running OpenAI and Meta large language models (LLM) at a potential 3 gigawatt (GW) data centre in the city.
Not just this, Reliance also reportedly discussed hosting and running OpenAI models locally so that the homegrown conglomerate can keep Indian customers’ data within the country’s borders.
This follows Reliance executives reportedly holding talks with government officials on data localisation mandates, which make it compulsory foreign AI companies to store the data of Indians locally, for security and privacy reasons.
The partnership with Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) could help both OpenAI and Meta leverage the conglomerate’s distribution ecosystem to offer their service to a bigger chunk of Indian users.
The move will also help the Sam Altman-led company achieve 1 Bn daily active users by the end of this year. Despite being home to one of the biggest markets globally for OpenAI, the price-sensitive Indian market contributes very little to the company’s top line.
While it would be interesting to see if the deals materialise, homegrown startups continue to push the envelope with their affordable and India-centric offerings. Be it SarvamAI or Krutrim, Indian AI startups have raised millions of dollars to build Indic LLMs and other AI offerings.
Additionally, the union government has also pushed the pedal on fostering a vibrant AI startup ecosystem in the country with the INR 10,300 Cr IndiaAI Mission and other incentives.
Earlier this year, the Centre floated a proposal to develop an indigenously-built AI foundational model. As a result, 67 startups including SarvamAI, CoRover.ai and Ola’s Krutrim submitted applications for building the LLMs.
