India, July 15 -- OpenAI CEO Sam Altman must have surprised the world when he said the upcoming GPT-5 might already be smarter than he is. Of course, this could be marketing hype. Conversely, it may indicate that GenAI is entering a new phase, where a unified system can tackle any critical challenge or create core components to drive innovation.

In India, GenAI is rarely used to build foundational blocks. Instead, many AI startups leverage readily available large language models (LLMs) to develop application layers. This new wave of startups has swept the GenAI space in the past two years, attracting most funding. Although most of these applications focus on solving conversational AI bottlenecks, a handful cater to vertical use cases suc...