In April, OpenAI hired its first employee in India. Pragya Misra, who is now leading the public policy and partnership for India, has always been an entrepreneur at heart. Pragya’s story is one of breaking boundaries and embracing diverse roles with unparalleled finesse.
Before joining OpenAI, she was the director of public affairs at Truecaller. The 39-year-old built a startup on her own and became WhatsApp’s first employee in India.
Beyond the corporate boardrooms, Misra shines in a completely different arena. Few people know that she is one of the top three amateur golfers in India and has represented the country in international tournaments.
An MBA graduate from the International Management Institute (2012), she has also studied Bargaining and Negotiations at the London School of Economics and holds a commerce degree from Delhi University.
In her downtime, she hosts The Pragyaan Podcast, exploring topics like tech, politics, entrepreneurship, meditation and consciousness.
All of this makes it obvious why OpenAI as its ambassador in India chose Misra – a leader who can wear multiple hats.
Discussing her plans and journey so far at OpenAI with AIM, Misra shared insights into the company’s decision to expand in the country. According to her, OpenAI is especially focusing on solving problems with AI for one of the most populated countries in the world, which has almost a billion smartphone users.
Misra underscored OpenAI’s mission to build AGI for the benefit of all of humanity, which makes the company take India very seriously due to its population demographic.
Notably, India has the world’s second-largest ChatGPT user base after the US. The country is also the second-largest in terms of the volume of its developer community. “We have seen some incredible solutions come out of the developer ecosystem,” she said while referring to sectors like healthcare, education, agriculture, and even accessibility. These innovations from India gave OpenAI the idea of how to build its models in such sectors.
What’s the Point of OpenAI in India?
For Misra, what is interesting is understanding how a country with people who have access to smartphones and the internet really moves the needle from the bottom to the top of the socioeconomic pyramid. “I often say this that if you can solve [a problem] for India, you can solve [it] for the world.”
While the focus remains on safety and privacy, one of the primary concerns for the Indian market is the pricing of such AI models. Misra said that OpenAI has been working on solving this issue and has drastically reduced the price of the tokenizers of these models for the country.
“He just loves India,” Misra said while talking about Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. She revealed that every time she speaks to Altman about the use cases that India is building, he asks how the headquarters can help India to scale that using OpenAI’s technology. “Compared to many of the solutions we see out of other countries from the developer ecosystem, the stuff that is coming out of India is just incredible.”
Misra explained that developers from India are building things that can be scaled not just for their own country but can also help solve problems for other countries. “The healthcare and agriculture solutions that come out of India are actually very helpful for countries in Africa or Vietnam,” she further said.
What Can Indian AI Startups Learn from OpenAI?
Citing the example of the expansion of UPI across India and its global reach, Misra said she believes India’s part in the global conversation around AI is taking a similar shape.
Several AI startups are trying to solve the same problems as OpenAI in India, but the company doesn’t see them as competitors. Recalling how Prime Minister Narendra Modi referred to AI as ‘Aspirational India’, Misra said there is a lot of excitement among startups building AI in the country.
“We are all on the right track and we are moving along with the way the intelligence is moving,” Misra said. “Don’t bet your business model against these frontier models, because the models are just going to get smarter and smarter,” she said, sharing the example of how from GPT-4o, which was a graduate-level intelligence model, OpenAI has now jumped to o1, which is a PhD-level reasoning model.
As OpenAI continues to expand its team in India, Misra advises engineers to keep understanding and experimenting with OpenAI’s models and create something that would benefit society. She added that it’s only been two years since OpenAI became a product company, slowly transitioning into an enterprise company. It is also heavily expanding across the world, with India set to become a focal point for expansion from next year.
Misra took the impact of Healthify and Be My Eyes as examples and talked about how OpenAI is penetrating the Indian market and creating an impact not just for the country but also beyond. She said that there are Indian initiatives and startups that are already building products for the world.
Misra’s favourite use case of AI is accessibility and how it can uplift marginalised people and help them contribute to society. “I see myself as someone who wants to support India and the community with whatever OpenAI can bring because that’s the company’s hat I wear, but of course, I am an Indian at heart,” Pragya said. “How can the amalgamation of that take India forward?”
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