Social media is ruthless and spares no one, and many learn this the hard way. The latest name in the list is that of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

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Altman shared his cricketer avatar that he created using OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT, and the anime-style image it rendered was him wielding a bat in the Team India jersey. 

Altman shared in an X post that he fed ChatGPT the prompt: “Sam Altman as a cricket player in anime style”. The bot generated an image of Altman holding a bat in a blue India jersey. 

Altman’s post sent social media users into a tizzy. 

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Some Indian social media users were elated to see Altman in their team’s colours, but many wondered about his motives for sharing the image.

“Sam trying hard to attract Indian customers,” one user said.

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“Now awaiting your India announcement. How much are you allocating out of that $40bn to India,” another user asked in comment referring to the record funding recently secured by Altman for his firm, OpenAI.

Since India is a populous nation where the craze for cricket is immense, ChatGPT may have learned this during its training, but social media users didn’t give Altman any benefit of the doubt.

Also Read | 'India outpacing the world': OpenAI CEO Sam Altman lauds AI adoption wave in India

Another user shared the pattern he spotted in Altman’s recent social media posts and popped a question that seems to be on many users’ minds.

“Over the past few days, you’ve been praising India and Indian customers a lot. How did this sudden love for India come about? It feels like there’s some deep strategy going on behind the scenes,” he wrote on X.

Altman had recently praised India’s adoption of AI technology, and said it was “amazing to watch” and that it was “outpacing the world”.

One Reddit user said, while sharing Altman’s post on X, “Can someone tell me what Sam Altman is talking about here in his tweet?”

Just a few days earlier, Altman had retweeted Studio Ghibli-style images of Prime Minister Narendra Modi that had been shared by the Indian government’s citizen engagement platform.

Also read: Studio Ghibli-style images: AI tools other than ChatGPT to transform your photos for free

Now, for those who may question why Altman needs to pander to India when his firm and its chatbot are doing well, the reason may lie in his past views on India’s AI capabilities that had left many ruffled.

During his 2023 visit to India, Altman had been dismissive of small Indian start-ups making AI tools that could compete with OpenAI’s creations.

At an event, when he was asked how a small, smart team with a low budget of about $10 million could build substantial AI foundational models, the OpenAI CEO had replied that it would be “totally hopeless” to attempt this.

Also read: 'OpenAI not for sale': Sam Altman calls Elon Musk 'competitor who is not able to beat us'

Altman visited India again in February this year, but with very different views, as he expressed eagerness to collaborate with India on making low-cost AI models

He met Indian minister Ashwini Vaishnaw and praised India for its swift pace of adopting AI technologies. He revealed that India was OpenAI’s second-largest market, and the number of users had tripled in a year.
Technology analysts say that India is a huge AI market, and social media users have seen other CEOs woo India because of its massive user base and its perceived profitability.

In January this year, Aravind Srinivas, the founder of AI search engine Perplexity, said in a post on X that he was willing to invest both $1 million and five hours of his time every week to “make India great again in the context of AI”.

And since AI models like Grok and Gemini are also becoming popular in India, Altman may have been driven by pure business interests and nothing else.