India’s generative AI startups look beyond ChatGPT-like models

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₹1—no physical doctor’s time can be this affordable," Pratyush Kumar, cofounder of Sarvam and adjunct faculty at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras, told Mint last month. “Instead of taking clientele away from doctors, in India, such domain-specific AI models can make healthcare more accessible to a wide population base." The approach Sarvam, Adya.ai and some of their peers are taking marks a sobering change after an initial AI euphoria to create general purpose generative AI models.

Competing with Microsoft-owned OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini will not only be expensive but tough given the headstart they have. AI applications solving smaller problems offer a better chance at success.

“It’s important for startups to solve specific, targeted problems," said Ankush Sabharwal, cofounder of CoRover, which has created BharatGPT. "Even within healthcare, the nature of services needed for metro markets is different from that in villages.

Because of this, taking a domain-specific AI model approach is key—building ‘India-focused’ models is also too large, and Big Tech is too big a competitor for this." Adya.ai, which raised $1.2 million in a pre-Series A funding round from the Indian Angel Network collective, is training its models to power ready-to-deploy AI assistants for e-commerce and retail companies to serve as customer service agents, said Shayak Mazumder, chief executive officer at the startup. “This is only the first domain that we’re targeting, and we’ll expand to more domains in future." According to Kashyap Kompella, technology analyst and founder of tech consultancy RPA2AI, building domain-specific AI applications and sub-models for enterprises “is the ideal sweet spot from development cost, market