New Delhi, Aug. 10 -- On Thursday, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman unveiled GPT-5 with native support for 12 Indian languages. Last year, Google expanded its AI model Gemini's native support for nine Indian languages. With artificial intelligence startups Anthropic and Perplexity also focusing on Indian languages, regional-language internet is fast emerging as a huge AI battleground.Mint explains why.

Foundational AI models are trained on massive troves of data and produce responses in plain text. To do this, AI firms rely on publicly available information to train their models, and most information on the internet is in English. As a result, the world's top AI models are all natively based on data that's available in English. This lea...