Sam Altman courts Indian cricket fans with anime transformation

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shared an anime-style portrayal of himself in his latest post—as an Indian cricket player.

Abandoning the Studio Ghibli-style art that recently sparked a wave of user-generated AI artworks on social media, he posted, “prompt: sam altman as a cricket player in anime style.”

The image shows Altman holding a cricket bat and sporting a jersey with emblazoned “India” on it.


Reactions on social media were mixed. Some users posted AI-generated images of Altman in different styles, from caricatures to playing entirely different sports, including basketball.

One user asked, “Why did it choose India to represent you? GPT probing your tweets in real time?”

Another commented, “What a great example of free marketing strategy to the largest share of users untapped, integrating the current viral product feature. Well done @sama.”

A third user commented: “The sudden surge in India-related tweets sparks speculation about a major collaboration. India is the world’s MAU farm.”

In an earlier post, Altman had talked about how India is emerging as a global leader in artificial intelligence (AI) adoption, with an unprecedented surge in innovation and creativity.

“What’s happening with AI adoption in India right now is amazing to watch. We love to see the explosion of creativity—India is outpacing the world,” he said.

On Wednesday, he teased an enhanced version of ChatGPT's image-generating feature on X, saying, “y'all are not ready for images v2...”