Wong Yu Liang/Getty Images
Which generative AI apps are people using? Which ones do they try a few times and then abandon, and which ones do they stick with? California-based venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz sheds light on these questions in the third installment of its Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps list.
Plus: Best AI Chatbots of 2024
The company says it analyzes available data every six months to see what AI apps people are using. Andreessen Horowtiz then creates two lists of the top 50 apps: one by unique visitors and another by monthly active users. Not surprisingly, the app that takes the top spot on both lists is ChatGPT.
While there is some overlap between the two lists, very few apps make it onto both. Here's a closer look at the data.
When it comes to monthly unique visitors over the past six months, ChatGPT leads by a wide margin, with familiar names like Character.ai, Perplexity, Claude, and Suno rounding out the top five, and JanitorAI, Quillbot, Poe, LinerAI, and CivitAI rounding out the top ten.
And want to get a free year of Perplexity Pro? Here's how to apply (and why you should!)
In terms of total monthly active users, ChatGPT once again takes the number one spot, but the top five is quite different: Microsoft Edge, Photomath, Nova, and Bing round out the top five, while Remini, Chat & Ask AI, Brainly, Meitu, and Character.AI round out the top ten.
What can we learn from this?
First, the data shows that people are primarily using AI for creative endeavors: Andreessen Horowitz notes that 52% of the apps on both lists are focused on content creation or editing. Most of these are apps that create images or videos, but apps that generate sound and music are also popular.
Video generation apps Luna and Viggle appeared at the top of the monthly visitor rankings for the first time, coming in at 14th and 21st place, respectively, indicating high interest in AI-generated videos. Music generation app Suno was also in the rankings last time, but this time it jumped from 36th to 5th place.
And how ChatGPT was used to scan 170,000 lines of code in seconds, saving hours of research work.
It's understandable that people would be interested in generative AI apps that can create photos, voice, and music, but the apps they subscribe to are a different story. Most of the apps at the top of the monthly active users list are either general-purpose AI apps like ChatGPT, Bing, and Microsoft Edge, or niche apps like PhotoMath.
Photomath likely saw a surge in people seeking math help at the end of the school year, so it will be interesting to look at the next list and see if those subscribers continued using it over the summer holidays.
Andreessen Horowitz also points out that apps that generate more than just images are on the rise: In their last list, just six months ago, generative apps were almost entirely image-based. In this list, image generators make up just 41% of generative apps.
