Sam Altman tips India to overtake as OpenAI’s biggest market with free GPT-5 rollout

New Delhi: India, currently OpenAI’s second-largest market, could soon become its largest globally, CEO Sam Altman said on Wednesday as the company unveiled its next-generation model, GPT-5, which will be available free to all users.

Hailing India as an "incredibly fast-growing" market, Altman noted the remarkable pace at which Indian citizens and businesses are adopting Artificial Intelligence (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.

"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," Altman said during a media briefing.

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 than 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 blogpost.

The new model is a major upgrade over its predecessor, GPT-4, and represents a “pretty significant step” toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), Altman said.

"GPT-5 is really the first time that I think one of our mainline models has felt like you can ask a legitimate expert, like a PhD-level expert, anything... We wanted to simplify it and make it accessible. We wanted to make it available in our free tier for the first time," he said.

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.