With freebies, OpenAI, Google vie for Indian users and training data

OpenAI, Google and Perplexity have begun an unprecedented fight for artificial intelligence users in India, rolling out freebies in a strategy seen as a way to harvest troves of multilingual training data in the world's most populous nation.

India is the second-biggest smartphone market with 730 million devices. On average, Indians consume 21 gigabytes of data each month, paying 9.2 cents per gigabyte, one of the world's lowest mobile data rates.

To lure price-conscious users, Google in November started giving its $400 Gemini AI Pro subscription for free for 18 months to 500 million customers of Reliance Jio, India's biggest telecom player. Last week, it added India to dozens of countries where it is offering its heavily discounted "AI Plus" package.

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