OpenAI seems to have found product-market fit with young Indians. The company said on Friday that users between 18 and 24 years of age accounted for nearly 50% of messages sent to ChatGPT in the country, and users under 30 accounted for 80%.
The AI lab said Indians use ChatGPT mostly for work, with 35% of all messages relating to professional tasks, compared to 30% globally.
In particular, the company’s coding assistant, Codex, is seeing strong traction: OpenAI said Indians use Codex three times more than the global median, and weekly usage has increased by four times since the tool got a Mac app two weeks ago. Users in India are also asking three times as many coding-related questions as the median.
This is in line with findings from Antropic, which earlier this week said 45.2% of Claude’s tasks map to software-related use cases in India.
OpenAI said outside of work tasks, 35% of messages to ChatGPT from Indians requested guidance, 20% concerned questions about general information, and 20% were requests for the bot to produce or help with writing.
India is OpenAI’s second-largest market with more than 100 million weekly users, and the company has been actively trying to court Indians for its AI tools and services. The company offers a sub-$5 subscription tier in the country, and last year even ran promotional campaigns to spur adoption.
“AI adoption is moving faster than our ability to measure it – and that’s a challenge for anyone trying to make smart decisions. Signals is our way of putting real-world evidence on the table, so India’s AI debate can be grounded in facts, not hype,” OpenAI’s chief economist Ronnie Chatterji said in a statement.
OpenAI has had a busy few days in India, which is hosting a major AI Impact Summit in New Delhi this week. The company is opening new offices in Mumbai and Bengaluru this year, and has signed a major partnership with conglomerate Tata Group to secure 100 megawatts worth of AI compute capacity and distribute ChatGPT Enterprise within Tata’s IT services subsidiary, TCS.
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