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. Deepseek rocketed from obscurity to a leading ChatGPT challenger. AI video models advanced from experimental to fairly dependable (at least for short clips!). And so-called “vibecoding” is changing who can create with AI, not just who can use it. The competition is tighter, the stakes are higher, and the winners aren’t just launching, they’re sticking.
We turned to the data to answer: Which AI apps are people actively using? What’s actually making money, beyond being popular? And which tools are moving beyond curiosity-driven dabbling to become daily staples?
This is the fourth installment of the Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps, our bi-annual ranking of the top 50 AI-first web products (by unique monthly visits, per Similarweb) and top 50 AI-first mobile apps (by monthly active users, per Sensor Tower). Since our last report in August 2024, 17 new companies have entered the rankings of top AI-first web products. — Read More
Daily Archives: March 11, 2025
The Model is the Product
There were a lot of speculation over the past years about what the next cycle of AI development could be. Agents? Reasoners? Actual multimodality?
I think it’s time to call it: the model is the product.
All current factors in research and market development push in this direction.
— Generalist scaling is stalling.
— Opinionated training is working much better than expected.
— Inference cost are in free fall.
This is also an uncomfortable direction. All investors have been betting on the application layer. In the next stage of AI evolution, the application layer is likely to be the first to be automated and disrupted. — Read More
I quit my FAANG job because it’ll be automated by the end of 2025
Until this February, I had gainful employment at [redacted FAANG co] doing machine learning engineering for fine-tuning LLMs on language translation tasks. It was a great gig, and I enjoyed the work and my coworkers. However, taking a medium-term look at the market dynamics surrounding my employment prompted me to quit a few weeks ago. I’m now convinced that my former job there will be obsolete by the end of the year. — Read More
DOJ: Google must sell Chrome, Android could be next
Google has gotten its first taste of remedies that Donald Trump’s Department of Justice plans to pursue to break up the tech giant’s monopoly in search. In the first filing since Trump allies took over the department, government lawyers backed off a key proposal submitted by the Biden DOJ. The government won’t ask the court to force Google to sell off its AI investments, and the way it intends to handle Android is changing. However, the most serious penalty is intact—Google’s popular Chrome browser is still on the chopping block. — Read More
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