The Top 100 GenAI Products, Ranked and Explained

This month, a16z’s Consumer team released the fourth edition of the GenAI 100 — a data-driven ranking of the top 50 AI-first web products and mobile apps, based on unique monthly visits and active users. In just six months, the consumer AI landscape has shifted dramatically. Some products surged ahead, others plateaued, and a few unexpected players reshaped the leaderboard entirely. In this episode, a16z General Partner Anish Acharya and Partner Olivia Moore join us to unpack the latest rankings and explore the key cultural and product moments that brought us to this point. Which applications are leading the pack — and which ones are quietly on the rise? What do trends like AI video, companion apps, and “vibe coding” reveal about the future of consumer AI? And for the first time, the team also analyzed which products aren’t just gaining users, but generating real revenue. If you’re looking to understand where we are in the GenAI adoption cycle — and what might come next — this episode offers a data-backed view into one of the fastest-moving corners of technology. You can find the full GenAI 100 list at: https://a16z.com/100-gen-ai-apps-4/ Timecodes: 00:00: Consumer AI Trends 00:36: The Gen AI 100 List: Methodology and Insights 02:38: Pivotal Moments in AI Development 05:37: Assumptions and Realities in AI 08:48: Emerging Trends and Newcomers 11:53: The Brink List: Near Misses and Future Contenders 16:08: Surprises and Consistencies in AI Adoption 18:31: The Future of AI Applications 19:40: Traffic Trends and User Demographics 20:32: Resurgence and New Use Cases 22:47: Competitors and Market Dynamics 25:30: AI Video Models and Trends 29:23: Mobile vs Desktop Usage 30:34: Revenue Insights and Monetization 34:06: Key Learnings and Final Thoughts Resources: Find Anish on X: https://x.com/illscience Find Olivia on X: https://x.com/omooretweets Stay Updated: Let us know what you think: https://ratethispodcast.com/a16z Find a16z on Twitter: https://x.com/a16z Find a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16z Subscribe on your favorite podcast app: https://a16z.simplecast.com/ Follow our host: https://x.com/stephsmithio Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Olivia Moore?

  Consumer activity typically lags by six to nine to 12 months. What's happening on the research side?

• 0:07Anish Acharya?

  So many of these assumptions, and that's why they're assumptions. They seem intuitively correct are going to turn out to be incorrect.

• 0:14Olivia Moore?

  We are finally on the verge of AI video starting to really work.

• 0:19Anish Acharya?

  It sort of follows the trend of AI decreasing the cost of creation in every way.

• 0:24Olivia Moore?

  Ninety-five percent of YC companies or something are now building using those tools. I think compared to where we're going to be, we're still incredibly early.

• 0:33Steph Smith?

  This month, our consumer team at A16Z dropped our fourth installment of the Gen AI 100 list, a list of the top 50 AI-first web products and mobile apps based on unique monthly visits and active users. And as our consumer team said themselves, in just six months, the consumer AI landscape has been redrawn. Some products surged, others stalled, and a few unexpected players rewrote the leaderboard overnight. In today's episode, we explore the latest rankings and the pivotal AI moments over the last few years.

• 1:07Olivia Moore?

  Midjourney and Character AI both came out before ChatGPT. Remember Snapchat's My AI, the Balenciaga Pope? Coke did their Christmas ad.

• 1:19Steph Smith?

  Each one of those unlocks broke down the assumptions that many of us held prior and have helped culminate hundreds, if not thousands, of AI applications that are now vying for our attention.

• 1:30Anish Acharya?

  The App Store is going to be chaos.

• 1:32Olivia Moore?

  Yeah.

• 1:33Anish Acharya?

  It is going to be chaos.

• 1:34Steph Smith?

  So which applications top the charts this time around? Whether household brand names or tools that you may have never heard of? Plus, where does this flurry of activity place us on the adoption curve? And what trends stood out, like AI video or vibe coding, that give us a window into what's to come? Finally, this fourth edition of the list is actually the first time that we broke out was actually making money. And today, we have A16Z consumer partner Olivia Moore and general partner Anisha Charya to break down all of the above. Of course, if you'd like to see the full list of the top 100 Gen AI apps, head on over to a16z.com/GenAI100-4, or you can check the link in our show notes.

• 2:19Steph Smith?

  Okay, let's get started.

• 2:23Steph Smith?

  As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see a16z.com/disclosures.

• 2:53Steph Smith?

  We're back for the fourth edition of the Gen AI 100 list. You guys have been working hard and tracking the consumer landscape for years now, but specifically for the last two and a half years since we really had that ChatGPT moment. Tell me more about how you're tracking that ecosystem and how that comes through in this list.

• 3:09Olivia Moore?

  Yeah, it's super fun. This is one of my favorite reports that we put together a couple of times a year. We track the consumer AI landscape through what we do every day, which is like meeting with consumer AI startups that come to pitch us, seeing what goes viral on Twitter. But actually, there's a whole separate set of companies and products that might be reaching the true mainstream consumer that might not even be marketing themselves as AI products, but they're powered by and made possible by AI. And so the whole original purpose of this report was to see how much overlap is there between those two categories? And what is the actual everyday person who might not know that they care about AI using in their day to day?

• 3:48Steph Smith?

  That's great. And so talk about the methodology, like what makes it onto this list or not? Because to your point, there's certain household names that you might see on Twitter or have that viral moment. But I think some people might be surprised to see what made it onto this list.

• 4:01Olivia Moore?

  So it's entirely based on data. We have two lists here, the top 50 on web and the top 50 on mobile. So the top 50 on web, we use a data provider called SimilarWeb, which tracks every single website globally. And we essentially go down in descending order of how many visits they get each month. For this report, it was January 2025. And then we go and we pick the first 50 of those that have the most monthly visits that are Gen AI first products. We do something similar on mobile, but a different data set from Sensor Tower. For mobile, we look at monthly active users on the app. And then again, we pick the top 50 that are Gen AI products. And then for the first time ever, we actually looked at the top 50 on mobile by revenue,

• 4:46Olivia Moore?

  which we hadn't done before. And it was a really interesting experiment because the lists were pretty non-overlapping.

• 4:52Steph Smith?

  Totally, and we'll get to that.

• 4:53Olivia Moore?

  Yes.

• 4:53Steph Smith?

  We've been in this AI ecosystem for a few years now. In your eyes, what were the pivotal moments that led up to this point in time where we have, like you said, 50 on mobile, 50 on desktop, and a whole lot more in the wider ecosystem?

• 5:07Olivia Moore?

  You often say, actually, it's usually like the papers are written and then the models are developed and then applications are built on top of it. So the consumer activity typically lags by six to nine to 12 months, what's happening on the research side. So maybe just from the consumer awareness or behavioral perspective, there's a couple of moments for me. Actually, Mid Journey and Character AI both came out before ChatGPT, which I think a lot of people don't know, but there was maybe these early niche communities of early adopters that were using both of those products in the summer and the fall of 2022, leading up to ChatGPT. And then post ChatGPT, things that just brought AI to consumer consciousness.

• 5:49Olivia Moore?

  So even remember Snapchat's My AI with that little bot that appeared at the very top of your feed?

• 5:55Steph Smith?

  Oh, yeah.

• 5:55Olivia Moore?

  And 150 million people used it. And for a lot of kind of younger consumers, that was actually probably their first real chance having a conversation with an LLM. On the image side, I think of the Balenciaga Pope, which was also, I think, spring 2023?

• 6:12Steph Smith?

  Such a cultural moment.

• 6:13Olivia Moore?

  It was, and I think it made a lot of people realize for the first time that they should even be interested in AI images because they could be that good and that convincing. The first big AI music moment for me was, well, the Bebe Eldrissy song, which I think was-

• 6:26Steph Smith?

  That was huge.

• 6:27Olivia Moore?

  -spring of 2024. And that also went mega viral. Notebook LM was another one. I think one of the moments where creative AI really shifted into almost enterprise consciousness was the end of last year when Coke did their Christmas ad. And a lot of that was generated by AI. And then, of course, the DeepSeek launch earlier this year.

• 6:47Anish Acharya?

  DeepSeek was so interesting because I think it sort of had become settled wisdom that it would be very hard for a horizontal model to get to mass consumer scale quickly again. Like ChatGPT had done it and ChatGPT had become a verb. And that opportunity had already been explored. And now we see DeepSeek growing as quickly as it did. And there's actually a couple of interesting nuances to DeepSeek. So one, I think, important nuance is the fact that they released their reasoning model for free at scale. So previously you had to use O1 Pro and you had to pay ChatGPT's premium subscription to get access to it. The other thing was just the product execution around chain of thought, which we've talked about a lot and I think is pretty well understood. But the fact that it showed you its thought process in real time was just super captivating.

• 7:33Anish Acharya?

  And now something that's become a step that every model takes. So I think it just really illustrates how early we are. You know, we as sophisticated users and investors are looking for further and further refinements. And once in a while, something like DeepSeek comes out of the clear blue sky and just blows away all assumptions.

• 7:50Steph Smith?

  Totally. And that word specifically, assumptions, I think is so key when you talk about these pivotal moments. I feel like you could actually match each pivotal moment with an assumption. Like an assumption being, oh, well, AI could never trick me into thinking a picture is real when it's not, right? Or I would never actually listen to a top 100 song that's generated by AI. Or ChatGPT has cornered the market and no one else can penetrate it, right? All of these assumptions that people are like, okay, sure, I was wrong about that prior one, but this one I'm pretty sure about. We're seeing just like months

• 8:20Olivia Moore?

  Yes.

• 8:20Steph Smith?

  being the delta between assumptions being broken. And so to your point on the arc of the market or the industry, I could see an argument where people are like, oh, we're actually pretty far along because we've already slashed all of those assumptions. But then on the other hand, I'm hearing we still have a long way to go. So maybe put us along that arc if we were to compare to the mobile era or the cloud era or previous technology eras. And are we in that early innovator stage still or are we somewhere else?

• 8:47Olivia Moore?

  I think we're still very much in the early adopter phase. In many of these categories, we're just arguably still in the infrastructure building era and moving into the application building era. It depends on the modality, like now LLMs are, maybe people thought that was a solved problem, but then again, DeepSeek came in and upended all of that. There's a lot of things that are definitely not fully solved, like AI video right now can generate great three or five or six second clips, but hopefully years from now we have AI video that can generate minutes long or even hours long movies. And so I think compared to where we're going to be, we're still incredibly early.

• 9:23Anish Acharya?

  Here are two assumptions that I think are interesting because it may turn out the reality is the exact opposite. One is that AI will be very good at transactional interactions, but humans will still be the ones to build relationships and connection. So an example of that would be what kind of phone calls are AI going to be best at? And I think the assumption was, well, they'll be great at sort of scheduling and logistics and the exchanging of information and facts. But we've heard over and over that in many cases, the AIs are more human than humans. They just have more patience, more nuance, they're never having a bad day, they're never hungover. So that's an interesting area of exploration. The other one that I think is interesting is the idea that humans will delegate work to the AIs and the AIs will do it.

• 10:06Anish Acharya?

  Like what if the AIs are the ones delegating the work to us? Perhaps AI is really good at organizing work and we're really good and also get a lot of joy out of doing it. So I think so many of these assumptions, and that's why they're assumptions, they seem intuitively correct, are going to turn out to be incorrect.

• 10:23Steph Smith?

  Totally. And if we think about the report, maybe one important data point is the fact that we see so many newcomers still, right? If we were in that later part of the innovation curve, you might expect more stagnancy, you might expect to see the same players, but every time you guys build out this report, we're seeing all of these newcomers. In this particular time, the fourth report, we saw 17 new companies on the web rankings in particular. And you actually have this quote where you say, "A few unexpected players rewrote the leaderboard overnight." So can you just speak to that and the movement that we're seeing?

• 10:53Olivia Moore?

  One of the biggest trends among the newcomers is we are finally on the verge of AI video starting to really work, not just for people who are enamored by AI and willing to generate 100 times to get a good clip, but for people who actually want to make something creatively in a condensed time period. So we had three new video models on the list this time. Hilo and Clang, which are both Chinese models. And then Sora, which was OpenAI's model that was announced, I guess, more than a year ago at this point, and finally was released. I think we'll see even more of a shakeup here because VO2 is the new Google model that is even next level beyond that from what we've seen in testing.

• 11:36Olivia Moore?

  And that is probably finally going to hopefully come out in the next three or six months. The other big category of newcomers were these vibe coding products. Cursor made the list. It's more of like an agentic IDE for a technical audience. And then Bolt made the list, which is for a non-technical audience where you basically go from a text prompt to a fully functioning web app. Even though they made the list, I think we've still seen there's a really significant portion of their users that are people who are in tech and are actually technical, but they might be using something like a Bolt or a Lovable, which made our Brink list, which we can talk about, to maybe prototype something easier and then export the code and go and play with it themselves.

• 12:19Olivia Moore?

  So I think we haven't quite seen the vibe coding products hit the true mainstream user in terms of someone who's never worked in tech or developed an app.

• 12:29Anish Acharya?

  I love this category. It's so fun and it's so satisfying to actually see your ideas come to life. In the case of Bolt and Lovable, sometimes they are just sort of compelling, interactive prototypes more than they are full-fledged products. But that's usually enough to get a feel for whether this is something you want to invest deeper in. It sort of follows the trend of AI decreasing the cost of creation in every way and people just trying more ideas.

• 12:54Steph Smith?

  I know. Just think about what that says about the untapped market of people who wanted to build things with code that this is on the top 50 list.

• 13:02Olivia Moore?

  And I think honestly, both of them haven't had many apps built on them yet that have gone super viral. And though, when that happens, and I'm sure it will, those will become stories of their own, which will then increase awareness of the products of the true mainstream audience. I think we're going to see a really interesting Diversity or range of products built on these, which it might just be like, this is my app that I just used for my very specific niche pain point. Or there might be people who never learned how to code, who want to build a venture scale product on something like a Bolt or Lovable. And so seeing how that plays out will be very cool.

• 13:38Anish Acharya?

  Yeah, I think there's two phrases I've heard that I like. One is sort of DIY or personal software. It never made economic sense to design software for one, really. The other is disposable software. Just as Suno and Udio made it possible to make a song just to capture a joke that would be irrelevant the next day. These products make it possible to create a product or an experience that may have an extremely short shelf life, like 20 minutes or a week or any other time period.

• 14:05Steph Smith?

  Let's talk about the Brink List because that's completely new to this year's fourth generation. So what is the Brink List and why add it?

• 14:13Olivia Moore?

  So the Brink List is essentially the five companies that almost made the list and were right below the cutoff, again, purely based on the data. So we pulled the five websites and the five mobile apps. And I think honestly, we were just curious to see what it would capture. We didn't quite know. The takeaway for me, it does reflect how fast things are changing because there were a couple of companies on the list, like Runway, Otter, UMAX, across web and mobile, that have been on the core top 50 ranks in the past. But maybe they got just edged out by like DeepSeek launching this time. And so they, they lost their spot for this ranking, but might be on there the next one and they still have massive usage. And then the other trend that it caught was a rise in more recent products, like Crea made the list and Lovable made the list,

• 14:57Olivia Moore?

  that are very much on the kind of consistent upswing. And if it continues, we might see them on the main ranks and they haven't made the main ranks before.

• 15:05Steph Smith?

  What did you predict that you would see on the list that you didn't really see there? Were there any surprises on that end?

• 15:11Anish Acharya?

  So one thing I thought we'd see more of is style transfer as an approach to scalable video. Because style transfer is just a much more tractable problem and has a lot lower cost of inference versus raw text to video. But researchers and product developers seem to be really going for it on text to video. And we've seen more of that than I would have expected.

• 15:31Olivia Moore?

  The other things that we didn't see on this list that we have seen at the model level, so that means maybe they'll be on the next list are like. Consumer voice products, there are a few of them, but not a ton of them. Some of the new, like the Gemini flash model that can see what's going on on your screen and interact with you, like I built something to yell at me if I go on Netflix or something.

• 15:53Steph Smith?

  I need that, it's the BS detector.

• 15:55Olivia Moore?

  Yeah, and starts like screaming at you, like, no, get back to work. Or like the new OpenAI operator model, which can actually interact with things on the browser level on your computer and get tasks done for you, like pay a bill or make a graphic design or hire someone to landscape your yard, something like that. I think there's always a lag because the models have to be released to developers and they have to be tuned by the developers and so it takes a while, but I would expect to see maybe an explosion of fun and unique and interesting products built on models like that on hopefully the next list or two, because it feels like we really have seen an explosion on the model side and it is right there in terms of manifesting at the apps level too.

• 16:40Anish Acharya?

  So one of the examples of this is deep research, which if you've played with it is completely magical, but it's a primitive, right? It's not a product, it's something to build other things with. So it's really unclear if deep research is going to be used to write college theses or is it going to be used to find the perfect meme to match a joke you want to make? And that's all going to be up to the app developers.

• 17:00Steph Smith?

  And just to double click on that, because you could see maybe a world where deep research is just this like more broad horizontal application, or you could see what you just described where developers are tailoring that to specific end use cases. Are you basically saying that you think the latter is more likely in terms of the progression of these models and apps?

• 17:19Anish Acharya?

  Not more likely, but I think it's underexplored. If you come to deep research today, you have the blank page problem.

• 17:24Steph Smith?

  Yep.

• 17:24Anish Acharya?

  And I'd love to see developers create some constraints that leads to unexpected outcomes.

• 17:29Olivia Moore?

  Yeah, like the known or the prescribed use of deep research right now is basically market research reports and it's amazing for that. I've used it for that a lot of times. But if you try other things, like one day we were trying to trace the origin of a meme and deep research is like a hundred x better version of that know your meme website that kind of goes through the history.

• 17:49Anish Acharya?

  Yes.

• 17:49Olivia Moore?

  And the etymology or however you describe it of how a meme comes to be.

• 17:53Steph Smith?

  I mean, that should be an app.

• 17:54Olivia Moore?

  Yeah, so there's lots of other use cases that aren't market research reports that could really benefit from. An incredibly obsessive compelling model that will go and read every website on the internet until it finds the answer.

• 18:08Steph Smith?

  I love that. I've actually always wanted that for creators because you know how there's the whole success overnight phenomenon that everyone else thinks happens, but it's not true for most creators who are like, you take Mr. Beast, he's like, I literally counted to what, 100,000?

• 18:20Olivia Moore?

  Yeah.

• 18:21Steph Smith?

  And then I did thousands of more videos until I, like, something started to work. And I wish you could actually just see, as you're saying, history of a meme, but history of a creator. Like, when did the unlock happen? So those are the things that you thought might be on the list, but you didn't actually see there. What about the opposite?

• 18:37Olivia Moore?

  I think the fact that the vibe coding products, like the Bolt and the cursors and Lovables, made the mainstream consumer list is just a testament to how widely they're used by the technical audience. Like, they have gotten to saturation so quickly. I think Gary Tan had some tweet that like, 95% of YC companies or something are now building using those tools. So it's something that nearly every developer now is probably using, which was maybe a surprise to me how quickly we reached saturation. We've talked about this, but a continuing surprise, so I don't know if it counts as one, but I still am surprised every time, is how many companion products are on the list and also how many of them rank so high. I think we had three companion products in

• 19:18Olivia Moore?

  the top 10. Two of them were NSFW oriented. Maybe not surprising when you think about, like, traffic on the internet in general, outside of AI, but a lot of people are even using them as like, interactive fanfiction. And some of the biggest fanfiction sites in the world are also top 100, top 200 global sites, so it makes sense in that way. And then I guess my last surprise would be there's actually quite a bit of consistency in the list over the past four versions. There's always new entrants, which is really exciting, but across the four lists, there's now 16 companies on the web ranks who have made it every single time and have kept the streak going, which is pretty remarkable

• 20:00Olivia Moore?

  when you think of how early we are in AI. But I think a testament to how those companies have cemented their brands, their products, their kind of, I guess, status in consumer consciousness. And I think a testament to the fact that like, real businesses have been built in consumer AI already.

• 20:17Anish Acharya?

  You know, to add to that, one of the surprises for me on Companion was not seeing more multimodality.

• 20:22Olivia Moore?

  Yes.

• 20:23Anish Acharya?

  Kind of the first glimmers of that at scale were Grok. You know, and Grok added a bunch of voices with some real aesthetics and points of view, you know.

• 20:32Olivia Moore?

  It's a good way to put it.

• 20:33Anish Acharya?

  But it's just interesting that that feels, and of course, character's got voice mode and more, but it feels like character is, and companionship is such a horizontal category. There's so much latent demand and it'll really increase once you have multimodality. You know, the other interesting thing is that a lot of the text to code work, my assumption was that there was a small number of people who are creating sites that were heavily trafficked, and that explained the rise of them. But actually, the majority of the traffic, correct me if I'm wrong here, Olivia, is from people doing creation, not just consuming other people's creations. So there's just, it really shows how much demand there is to make things, even if people are not that interested in consuming them.

• 21:10Olivia Moore?

  Yeah, you can track the traffic of like apps that people have launched on lovable.app versus visits to lovable.dev, which is where people go to make lovable products. And like lovable.dev has more usage.

• 21:23Anish Acharya?

  Significantly.

• 21:23Olivia Moore?

  More visits significantly than traffic to lovable.app, which gets back to what I was saying before, like, we have not even seen the first wave of viral products built on top of lovable and bold. And so when that happens, I think that the awareness of these types of platforms is going to go significantly up, Shu.

• 21:41Anish Acharya?

  The App Store is going to be chaos.

• 21:43Olivia Moore?

  Yeah.

• 21:44Anish Acharya?

  It is going to be chaos. We're going to need an AI just to solve the AI app management problem.

• 21:49Steph Smith?

  Completely. To that end, you talked about the fact that there are some consistent players.

• 21:53Olivia Moore?

  Yeah.

• 21:54Steph Smith?

  One of those players is ChatGPT, which we've talked about as the starting gun of some of this application development. ChatGPT has been at the very top of the list. Has it been that way for every single iteration of this?

• 22:05Olivia Moore?

  On web and mobile.

• 22:06Steph Smith?

  But maybe what would surprise people is that the traffic to ChatGPT hasn't always been the same trajectory. So maybe, can you talk about that and what did we see this time around?

• 22:15Olivia Moore?

  So it was basically flat for a while, which I think was surprising to a lot of people. Between February 2023, basically for a whole year through February 2024, it was essentially flat in monthly visits to the website. And I think at that point, from the data that I've seen, basically 50% plus of the traffic was students who were using it for essays or homework problems. But the vast majority of other people, me included, to be honest, had not maybe found a daily active use case for ChatGPT yet. And it's completely resurged more recently. So they two X'd the number of visits on web since then. They actually made their own announcement too, where they counted across web and mobile.

• 22:56Olivia Moore?

  And in the past six months, they grew from 200 million to 400 million weekly active users.

• 23:02Steph Smith?

  Wow.

• 23:03Olivia Moore?

  Which is especially surprising because it took them nine months to double before that. And it usually gets way harder to double at scale, not easier. I think from our perspective, if you even plotted on the graph, you can kind of track the increases to the release of new models that unlock new use cases. So like the new O1 reasoning models, the 4O models, which were multimodal for the first time, and then advanced voice mode. And then they've also launched new products like the operator that can perform tasks on your computer, like Canvas, where you can write more naturally. So it's both bringing in new users who never tried it. And then taking people like me, who honestly, I was maybe a weekly, if not less a weekly user.

• 23:45Steph Smith?

  Did you find your daily active use case?

• 23:45Olivia Moore?

  Yes, and now I'm a daily active, but across several use cases now. Some days I'm driving and talking to it voice mode. Some days I'm working on a memo and I'm generating something with deep research. Some days I'm doing some random other project and I'm brainstorming ideas with it. So I would expect that to continue as they release new models.

• 24:03Steph Smith?

  And have you heard from the ecosystem in terms of what more frequent use cases have emerged like yours in terms of if before it was a lot of students writing research reports? Is there a sense of understanding of what those newer use cases are?

• 24:16Olivia Moore?

  Yeah, I think it's gotten better at some things related to coding. It's gotten better at data analysis. And then, I mean, the reasoning models, it's hard to overestimate because in the past, you couldn't even rely on ChatGPT to tell you how many Rs were in strawberry accurately. So it was hard to feel good about really tasking any sort of delicate or serious work to it. And so I think there are probably a long tail of use cases that people have just migrated over now that they have more confidence in the models.

• 24:44Anish Acharya?

  What's interesting to add to that is that Claude is not a traditional number two player. Typically, the number two player has 10% of the market share and 10% of the product quality. And instead Claude sits in this very interesting place where it seems like it's more beloved by a smaller number of people. It's better at creative writing. It seems to have more of a personality, which is interesting because at least I think it's designed to be more constrained. And then it's also strangely much, much better at coding.

• 25:12Olivia Moore?

  Yes.

• 25:13Anish Acharya?

  Why? I don't know, but it's very interesting to see there's a place for both ChatGPT and Claude and Mistral and potentially other models all to sort of augment each other.

• 25:23Olivia Moore?

  The really interesting thing about this list when it came to general LLM assistant usage was like, we only had 10 days of data for DeepSeek for January because it launched at the end of the month. And it shot up from literally nothing to number two on the list, 10% of ChatGPT scale

• 25:39Steph Smith?

  Wow.

• 25:40Olivia Moore?

  on web within a week, a little bit more than a week. On mobile, it had even less than that, five days. And it was number 14. And if it had had five more days, it would have been number two. And the gap is even narrower there between DeepSeek and ChatGPT. So, again, to Anisha's point, like that was a surprise and that we could see kind of a broad-based LLM product go so viral still and capture so many users.

• 26:05Steph Smith?

  And DeepSeek was obviously the story when it came out. What have we learned about retention since then? And is that learning specific to DeepSeek? Or are we seeing that learning applied across the ecosystem?

• 26:16Olivia Moore?

  It's a little early a call on retention and also because they're giving away so much for free right now. It's somewhat easy to retain. I will say the mobile data is barely conclusive. So you can essentially look at sessions per week and time per week for any app. So we looked at perplexity, Claude, DeepSeek and ChatGPT. DeepSeek is already at the levels of perplexity and Claude, which is interesting. So users are spending about 20 minutes a week across 10 sessions. Still pretty significantly lags ChatGPT, which has like 45 minutes a week. So it's already at the level, if not actually slightly better. And this is a chart we put in the report too, versus perplexity and Claude in terms of engagement. On a retention basis, like how many users are coming back to the app, say,

• 27:02Olivia Moore?

  exactly 30 days, exactly seven days, exactly 60 days. It's just slightly below ChatGPT. So we're looking at 7% day 30 for DeepSeek and 9% day 30 for ChatGPT. It's too early to call on web because it's hard to track usage. Part of my theory here is if you look at DeepSeek usage, a lot of it is the US, but a lot of it is China and other countries where you can't use it. Or they try to make you not use it and you can only get by it with a VPN. And so in those markets, it's not ChatGPT versus DeepSeek versus perplexity. It's DeepSeek versus nothing. And so in those markets, I think they have like a structural advantage from the retention side that might skew the overall sample.

• 27:46Steph Smith?

  Totally.

• 27:47Anish Acharya?

  Next time, we should add a different cut for DeepSeek USA.

• 27:50Olivia Moore?

  Yes, exactly.

• 27:51Steph Smith?

  Yep, geographic breakdown.

• 27:53Olivia Moore?

  Yeah.

• 27:53Steph Smith?

  Talking about trends that we're seeing on the list, you mentioned AI video before, but anything else you want to call out there in terms of its presence on the report?

• 28:02Olivia Moore?

  Two of the video models were Chinese video models, which is super interesting. The models are less copyright sensitive in their training data.

• 28:11Anish Acharya?

  That's a great euphemism.

• 28:12Olivia Moore?

  Yeah, they're maybe more realistic and more prompted here and in the outputs as a result, but also just in China, it's easier to hire people to kind of caption videos. They have maybe a greater volume of researchers doing image and video stuff versus other stuff. I think Sora in some ways was a little bit disappointing for some people, whereas like the Chinese video models were maybe better than a lot of people expected, given the relative lack of capital that they've raised.

• 28:38Anish Acharya?

  That's right. I think an interesting trend is just seeing Creo on the Brink List.

• 28:42Olivia Moore?

  Yes.

• 28:42Anish Acharya?

  Creo is the single best place to access all the models and all the tools. And the nice thing that they do is stitch all of these things together to make them greater than some of their parts. So insofar as we live in this sort of multipolar world of models, image models, video models, language models, there'll be a role for aggregators like Creo to put them all together in a thoughtful way.

• 29:02Olivia Moore?

  Totally, especially because people who are deep in AI video understand this, but each model is known for being good at specific things like shots of people, shots of landscapes, anime, hyper realistic. And so it can rack up very quickly on $20 a month subscriptions if you're paying for 10 or 15 different models independently versus having one canvas to work with all of them.

• 29:23Anish Acharya?

  You also typically use the products together.

• 29:25Olivia Moore?

  Yeah.

• 29:26Anish Acharya?

  You usually generate an image in Midjourney or Flux, and then you take that image and upscale it, and then you put it as the beginning frame in a video. So you really want to not have the seams between all of those products.

• 29:37Steph Smith?

  Completely. Are we seeing these video models in particular become more opinionated? And what I mean by that is we see that in image models, right? Where Midjourney might be good at this and then you might see another model better at something else. And the users will gravitate towards either models or applications that provide them with that specificity or opinion. Are we seeing that in video yet?

• 29:57Olivia Moore?

  I'd say they're both becoming more opinionated on the model level, but also the application choices that they're making, that even the model companies are making, are becoming more opinionated. If you've used like a runway or cling or something, you can now prompt basically the camera angles or the wideness of the shot or all of these things a human cinematographer would do. You can prompt how the video sweeps over the surface of a screen. And so that's also a big factor in what you use for maybe even different parts of one video, which is interesting.

• 30:29Anish Acharya?

  I mean, the comment specifically, I still think Idiogram is one of the most unique models for sort of what it does, what it's great at, which is text generation, aesthetic that it has. It just sits in a very unique place in the ecosystem.

• 30:42Steph Smith?

  Yeah, we did an internal competition where we had to generate a bunch of video, 30 second video. And Idiogram was amazing for that because you could not get that layer of specificity anywhere else. And then you could then take what was generated in Idiogram and put it into another model to animate it or to swerve or to do whatever you needed to do.

• 30:59Anish Acharya?

  Well, they also have a fun feature, which essentially is image to text. So if you have a meme or a copyrighted image that you want to replicate or at least be inspired by, you can use their image to text and then use that text as the prompt to create a new image.

• 31:13Steph Smith?

  I also found that fascinating because I would prompt something. And as you learn when you're prompting with AI, in general, you learn that you don't know what you're looking for. And so when I would prompt, Idiogram would modify your prompt before generating the image. And then you could actually go interrogate that and be like, oh, that's why I'm getting X, Y, or Z. So video, actually, in general, it tends to be more of a mobile-first phenomena, right? We see tons of, even before AI, tons of applications that are focused on creators being able to edit and splice video. What are we seeing in terms of the difference between what's working on mobile and what's working on desktop?

• 31:45Olivia Moore?

  It's somewhat obvious, but like a lot of the things that are working on mobile are either things you want to use on the go or where the underlying asset you're working with is easily captured by the phone. So like, all of the avatar apps blew up on mobile because you have 10 selfies of yourself sitting on your phone. A lot of the voice-first consumer products that we are seeing working actually are on mobile versus web because it's easier and more natural to talk into your phone for language learning or for companionship or other use cases than it is to maybe talk into your laptop. And same with Homework Helper apps. Like, those are really blowing up on mobile as compared to web.

• 32:23Steph Smith?

  So maybe another interesting breakdown that kind of represents where we are in the innovation curve is not just what is getting views, but what's actually making money and how those aren't always one-to-one mirrored. What is making money today? What are we learning there? And is that the same as what's getting traffic?

• 32:40Olivia Moore?

  So for the first time, we actually ranked the top 50 by what Sensor Tower can measure as mobile revenue, which is typically in-app purchases and subscriptions, so probably not ads. And we ranked those separately from what has the most monthly active users. And there was only 40% overlap between the two lists.

• 32:57Steph Smith?

  Interesting.

• 32:58Olivia Moore?

  So a lot of difference. The surprise to me actually was the main categories are the same in terms of what's making money versus what people are using. So photo and video generators, photo and video editors, beauty filters and beauty enhancers, massive standalone category, and then the realm of ChatGPT, Copycat apps, both making a ton of money, getting a lot of users. But the companies within those categories are very different in terms of who's making money and who has the most usage. We actually found, we plotted like revenue per user versus number of users, and we found the apps that had smaller user bases out of this sample set were much more likely to be making significantly

• 33:41Olivia Moore?

  more money on a per-user basis. So apps like Speak, apps like Otter, Captions and video editing. There's a lot of reasons for this. One is that if you are making a lot of money per user, you're probably more of a serious prosumer app. And so you've probably actually gated the usage pretty significantly. Like you have to subscribe to use the product. And so there are companies on here that might be making 50, 100 million dollars in ARR off of only a million users, 2 million users. So they wouldn't make the ranks ironically enough for monthly active users, but they rank really, really high on a revenue basis, which is exciting. And then as anyone who looks at the mobile list knows, there's a lot of, maybe for the tech audience,

• 34:26Olivia Moore?

  seemingly random products on there of like, I've never heard of this. This is from a startup. And on mobile especially, there is a very precise game that you can play with like App Store ads and other kind of paid, but fairly low cost acquisition channels. And if you're doing this as an indie developer or maybe an app studio running internationally, you're not looking for the 10x payback of acquisition costs that we might be looking for as venture investors. So if you make back one or two x your money on a user, that's amazing. So you can get to 10 million users mostly by paying for them, but you're probably not going to make as much revenue or ultimately as much profit maybe as some of the companies that are lower usage but higher revenue.

• 35:08Steph Smith?

  And is there a learning there in terms of, you mentioned how by nature, if you start gating certain features or an application entirely, you are potentially stifling growth of the overall user base. Is there a learning in terms of how AI founders should be thinking about that trade off today?

• 35:25Olivia Moore?

  I think it depends. Some of these markets are naturally maybe not mainstream behavior. Like one example of a category that did appear on the mobile revenue list, but was not on mobile usage was several plant identification apps.

• 35:38Steph Smith?

  I love those.

• 35:39Olivia Moore?

  Yeah, where you take a picture, you save down the plan. It tells you exactly what it is if you've seen that plant before. Is that an app that 100 million people will have on their phones? Maybe not. But if you're one of the, like, I can think of a few relatives who love plants or love birds and like totally they'll pay a hundred dollars a year for that and they'll use it every day or every other day. So I think it's more for founders optimizing for the type of product you have and how mainstream it can be.

• 36:05Steph Smith?

  All right. So there's a lot of information here that we've covered. We've covered desktop. We've covered mobile. We've covered revenue versus users.

• 36:11Olivia Moore?

  Yeah.

• 36:12Steph Smith?

  And then we've also talked about the stickiness of some of these players, right? You said there was it 16 that have showed up every single list? So what can we learn from the last few lists?

• 36:23Olivia Moore?

  I feel like the biggest thing now, being a consumer investor for close to a decade now, it's almost like the more you know, the less you know, in some cases, because it all just comes back to the product at the end of the day. Like technologists or investors can have opinions on the best monetization strategy or the best growth hacks, but in the end, if the product isn't capturing users' attention and isn't retaining them, the business is just going to be a completely leaky bucket of users in users out. Often, we meet with these amazing PhD researchers, best in class in the whole world in terms of their technical understanding of a model or capability. And they can struggle building in consumer sometimes because often the more complicated thing is not actually the thing that is highest utility, most delightful, most helpful to a consumer user.

• 37:09Olivia Moore?

  So we never like to be prescriptive on consumer products, but in general, we see when teams focus on either the pain point they're trying to solve or the unique experience they're trying to create and build towards that. And if that means you're actually, the old model is better than the new model, use that. If that means it's just one AI feature instead of the whole product being built on AI because it's not stable enough, like do that. I think in consumer, you really have to let the data be your guide there.

• 37:38Steph Smith?

  All right. That is all for today. If you did make it this far, first of all, thank you. We put a lot of thought into each of these episodes, whether it's guests, the calendar Tetris, the cycles with our amazing editor Tommy, until the music is just right. So if you like what we've put together, consider dropping us a line at ratethispodcast.com/a16z. And let us know what your favorite episode is. It'll make my day, and I'm sure Tommy's too. We'll catch you on the flip side.