Open AI CEO Sam Altman on Thursday reacted to a viral moment from the India AI Impact Summit, when he refused to hold the hands of rival and Anthropic chief Dario Amodei, while posing for a group photograph with Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The tech giants, including Google CEO Sundar Pichai, had gathered on stage after Modi's address at the summit.
Pichai and Altman were standing on either side of Modi, who held their hands aloft and asked others to join in.
However, Altman and Amodei, standing next to each other, conspicuously did not do so and raised their fists, breaking the chain. The two tech leaders looked distinctly uncomfortable as well.
Reacting to the moment that went viral on social media, Altman told Moneycontrol that he "was sort of confused like when he (PM Modi) grabbed my hand and put it up, and I just wasn't sure what we were supposed to be doing."
Altman, 40, has been CEO of the American AI research organisation OpenAI since 2019.
Amodei, three years older, is the co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, the American company behind the large language model series Claude.
They worked together in OpenAI before Amodei branched out.