What happened
Speaking at the AI Impact Summit in India, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stated that early versions of true superintelligence are a "couple of years away." Altman predicted that by the end of 2028, data centres will hold more intellectual capacity than exists outside them. He declared AI democratisation the only safe path forward, explicitly rejecting "effective totalitarianism" in exchange for technological breakthroughs. Altman also recognised India's rapid progress in advanced AI deployment since his last visit a year ago.
Why it matters
Infrastructure planners and policy architects face a compressed timeline because OpenAI now publicly targets 2028 for a global intelligence shift. Altman's push for democratisation aligns with OpenAI's recent strategic expansion in India. However, this distributed access model directly contrasts with Microsoft's recent warnings regarding a growing global AI infrastructure divide. Because OpenAI anticipates data centres surpassing human intellectual capacity within four years, regional compute sovereignty and local deployment capabilities become immediate constraints for national AI strategies.
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