Growing ChatGPT, Perplexity use makes India largest LLM market in the world: Report

Mumbai, Dec 17 (PTI) The growing use of platforms such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity has made India the world's largest market for large language model (LLM) adoption, a foreign brokerage said on Wednesday.

This makes India the "ideal test bed" for agentic AI apps built on top of LLMs that can reason, plan and execute tasks independently, the report by Bofa Securities said.

However, on the flip side, this can lead to some impact on the domestic startup ecosystem, Bofa Securities said.

The number of ChatGPT downloads peaked at over 24 million in July before falling a bit and plateauing at 24 million once OpenAI zero-cost subscriptions, while Airtel's bundled pack helped Perplexity peak at over 20 million downloads in October, the report said.

ChatGPT is the number one platform in India among the LLMs with around 145 million monthly active users and Gemini comes second at 105 million, it said.

On a daily basis, 65 million Indians use the OpenAI-led ChatGPT, while Gemini comes second at 15 million daily average users.

Over 16 per cent of ChatGPT's global base is from India, making the country as the largest market for the platform, the Bofa Securities report said.

Interestingly, India is also the largest for peers, including Google Gemini which gets 30 per cent of its monthly average users from here and Perplexity which derives 38 per cent of monthly average users, it said.

Complimentary subscriptions to LLM apps by domestic telcos were pointed out as among the reasons leading to the feat by the brokerage Bofa Securities.

Other factors, including over 700 million mobile users, access to affordable data plans allowing a user to consume over 20 GB of data by paying just USD 2 a month, and a young and English-speaking population, also helped, it said.

The adoption at scale is a win-win for all, including the consumers who get to improve their productivity and learning and transcend language barriers, as many of the apps are available in regional languages as well, and also the global LLMs, the report said.

The global LLMs get access to vast and rich data which can be used to train and refine the models, and also improve handling of multi-lingual and culturally nuanced queries, it said.

It is also a positive for telcos, the report said, pointing out that entities in the highly competitive sector can expand their average revenue per user, create upselling room through targeted offerings in the future and also create collaboration opportunities in datacenter space with global entities.

Elaborating on the impact on the domestic startups, it said global LLMs may dominate before local LLMs mature or scale, and pointed to Meta and Google's dominance of the market through offerings like Facebook, Youtube etc.

Also, the network effect of global LLMs would make them better placed to meet local consumer demand via agentic AI wrappers better than what Indian startups could do, it said. PTI AA MR