The Top 100 GenAI Consumer Apps

As AI matures, these mafias of talent or hubs of talent are spinning out of different research labs, different universities, and kind of building these different communities of founders around the globe, which is very cool.

You and the consumer team posted this Generative AI 100 list.

It was a really fun one to work on, actually, and, and something that we'll be putting out probably at least every 6 months, given how fast the space is changing.

Maybe 3 months.

I know, we might need to accelerate it even further.

Essentially, the question we were trying to answer was like, yes, there are these AI names that everyone knows and a lot of people use, like ChatGPT and Midjourney. But beyond that, like, what are the other products that normal people might be using every day for art, for creativity, for work, for education? We were really interested to see if there was gonna be any surprising names in there or what trends would pop out. So we kind of, I don't wanna say boiled the ocean on this, but we literally screened every single global website by—

Which means like how many are being pulled up?

Tens of thousands, if not more. So we have a data provider called SimilarWeb where you can sort every website in existence by number of monthly visits. And so then we kind of manually filtered that into what are the first 50 of these that are AI companies.

Mm-hmm.

And then we did the same on mobile with Sensor Tower, which gives us App Store data globally. Who has the most monthly active users on an app? Found the top 50, and then we had our distinct web and mobile lists.

Amazing.

And so you actually pulled a similar list, maybe just for web, in September.

Yes.

So between these 2 lists, what did you notice? And were there any newcomers that really caught your eye? Absolutely.

Yeah, we actually decided to pull a separate mobile list because there was not a lot of overlap, which the products that are succeeding on web for AI, I think, are distinctly different. I think there was only 5 or 6 companies that made both lists, if that.

Really?

Yeah.

OK.

So some pretty big differences there. I would say, so all the mobile companies were brand new to the list. A couple categories really popped on mobile that we didn't see as much on web, but it makes sense because they kind of take advantage of mobile as a platform in a unique way. So edtech is a great example. There are companies like ELSA that are kind of a language learning. They take advantage of the fact that you can talk into your phone much more easily than you can talk into a computer and get real-time feedback on pronunciation and things like that. Lots of homework helper apps where you just take a picture and, and get an answer as well.

Which is also fascinating because you're talking about the device, right, where the camera's at hand.

Exactly, yes. So mobile, I think what works really well on mobile is kind of audio capture and then image capture and availability. So exactly to that point about image capture, you probably have tried Lensa or Epic or Remini was another one that popped up. All of these avatar companies that take advantage of the fact that we have dozens of selfies stored.

Yeah, on our camera roll. Yeah, and are willing to pay literally like $20 for some cool-looking avatars.

Those are the types of products that have worked on mobile. Keyboards as well. There's some fun niche products where it's like, upload a screenshot of your dating app conversations, and then we'll plug into your keyboard and tell you what to say next to like have more charisma or something like that.

Fascinating.

Yes. They get, they go very viral on TikTok, as you can probably imagine. I can imagine.

Um, the one other interesting thing about mobile was ChatGPT was so slow to launch an app.

Mm-hmm.

They lost a little bit of ground just from like an App Store keyword and optimization perspective. So there are quite a few apps on our mobile app list that are essentially copycat products and using OpenAI's own model, but are named slightly differently and are just kind of playing this like maybe short to medium term arbitrage on App Store optimization.

Right. So they're just a layer in between.

Yes. And a very, very thin layer and often like using maybe a weaker version of the model, but still charging people for Sure. There's been a lot of controversy around this topic, and I think the App Store has been, uh, kind of clamping down on it a little bit.

So that might be a change that we see, uh, for the next version of the mobile list.

Well, that's actually fascinating because, I mean, the, the models do differ in performance, but for the average consumer, can, can you actually tell if it's 3.5 or 4?

And the average person won't know, for example, that like if you pay $20 to ChatGPT, you're getting GPT-4, you can access the internet, you can get video. upload pictures. If you're a normal person who doesn't know the names of these models, you might not understand that, like, on this other app, you're paying for access to the free version of the OpenAI model that you would get on ChatGPT.

So interesting. So we talked about the mobile-web split. Let's jump back to some of those newcomers. Were there any other companies that you were perhaps surprised to see, or, you know, maybe you hadn't even seen in, you know, the work that you do that showed up and you're like, wow, this is really big?

Totally. Yeah, I think we saw a couple companies kind of make the biggest jumps up the list. ElevenLabs was one. They were on the first version. Gamma was another one, which is an AI presentation document slide deck builder that I think is another example of one that kind of went consumer viral and now getting pulled into workspaces. So productivity as a whole was kind of a big new category on web as those products mature. The other big new trend on web in particular was companion apps.

Mm-hmm.

I think on the first list there were 2 companion products and I think there were 8 on the most recent one. Most of them were actually uncensored models. So, not to say they were all NSFW, because that isn't necessarily the use case, but they allow you more freedom to talk about different topics, do different things than you can do if you were just trying to use ChatGPT as a companion, because OpenAI is somewhat restrictive in how you can kind of interact with the product there.

Right. And if Character AI is one that a lot of people are familiar with, they built their own model. These other ones where you're talking about this lack of constriction, are they using LLaMA, or how are they getting to—

Yeah, it's a good question. It depends. A lot of them have maybe tuned their own models, but many of them maybe have not trained a full foundation model in the way that Character AI has. I would say a lot of them are also exploring maybe new modalities. There's a company called talky, that's almost appealing to, like, the gamer trader mindset when it comes to companions, where you actually unlock, like, trading cards as you talk with companions for different amounts of time, and then you can kind of sell them in this, like, in-app marketplace almost.

Really?

Yeah.

So, it gets back to this question of how do companions go mainstream? And I think the answer is there's different versions of what a companion looks like that probably attract and hook in different types of users.

Yeah.

And it's not always like a completely freeform conversation. Maybe it looks like a game, maybe it looks like a coach, maybe it looks like something else.

And are you seeing those companion apps show up for the things that you just mentioned, for the coach, the therapist, et cetera?

I would say most of the use cases so far are pure consumer and uncensored. We are expecting to see some of the other categories, but honestly, they're less viral in these early days.

Makes sense.

And so they're not popping up the list as quickly, but we talked to lots these companies, they're growing, but maybe not the 0 to 20 million monthly web visits that some of these uncensored companion apps can get.

And maybe we can just quickly speak to that. I mean, I think I've seen some data that you've all shared on just how many visits or interactions some people are having. Maybe we just talk about that because it's kind of shocking in a way, but also not surprising in a way.

Yeah, absolutely. So for the mobile products as well as the web products, but especially interesting on mobile because you can really granularly track a user and say how How much time are they spending per day, per month? How often are they coming back? And the insight there that I was like shocked by, and I say this as a big fan of the company, but Character AI has the average user up close to 300 sessions per month, uh, which again is like 10 sessions per day.

Yeah.

This is like iMessage usage, Snapchat usage, Instagram usage.

Really?

Yeah.

So I think we're starting to see like, yes, maybe the product isn't for everyone right now. You know, it hasn't reached the true, true mainstream, but it's getting there. And the people who are using it are really using it and clearly finding like deep, deep value from it.

Yeah.

And just to clarify for listeners, when you're saying a session, is that one message or that's actually one conversation?

That's a session on the app.

Yeah.

There's some filtering they do around it where if you just like accidentally open or close the app, they won't count it. So this is like an average session for a company like Character is probably going to be upwards of 5 minutes long. It's like a real kind of deeper conversation.

Wow.

You know, another trend you call out in the report is this idea that AI is a global pursuit.

Yes.

We're currently actually recording this in San Francisco, where a lot of tech has been built, but we're seeing, you know, like Mistral from France. And like, what else are you seeing in those global dynamics?

Yeah, it's been really exciting, actually. And this was a big change even from V1 of this list to the most recent version, a lot more global pursuits. And I think that's a function of, to your point, many of these models are opening up a little bit, whether they're available via API or whether whether they're open source, and it allows anyone anywhere to build a really cool AI product.

You don't have to be in San Francisco having raised, you know, $50 million, although we love those companies as well.

Yeah.

We have funded many of those companies also.

But you could be a solo developer in China, in Russia, anywhere. Mistral is a great example. PhotoRoom is another one on the list that made both the web and the mobile ranks. They're in France. As AI matures, these mafias of talent or hubs of talent spinning out of different research labs, different universities, and kind of building these different communities of founders around the globe, which is very cool.

I think it's the coolest thing to see all these different founders everywhere. Is there anything else you wanted to call out on the list in terms of new categories that you're seeing pop up?

Yeah, I would say a big leading indicator for the list, like if you wanted to predict what's gonna be on the list in 6 months, looking at the Discord data, you can even track like which Discord pages are getting the most invite traffic or things like that as a proxy for interest.

Right.

And many of those companies that get really big on Discord, like Midjourney, like Pika, like Suno, will then go and launch an independent web app that does really well. And we've seen that be fairly predictive now of— Suno was one of the highest-ranking new companies that we saw on the list this time, and they just sprouted out of a successful Discord. It's such an advantage because then you can build up a base of hundreds of thousands or millions of users. And so you're not quite cold-starting the web Yes. As you would be if you kind of didn't have that base of users before.

Totally. And how would you go about doing that?

So the same website provider that we use, SimilarWeb, you can— this is crazy, but you can get so granular as to see the most popular websites on each domain. And so you can filter by like discord.com/invite.

Right, the subdomains, right? Yes.

And then kind of click on each. I've seen a lot of interesting stuff. You can click on each one.

Correct, because they're not telling you what's not support.

No, no, no. They have— it's often some like weird string of letters and numbers.

Right.

Same thing with Reddit.

And then you click on it and you see like, okay, is this an AI product? We put some of the data on this in the list, but actually now many of the biggest Discords by growth are AI products like Midjourney and Pika and Suno. Like Midjourney itself is driving, you know, close to a percent of all kind of Discord invite traffic, which is very cool. And that's it. You know, that's a product that's been around for probably 18+ months now and still millions of people are using it on Discord every month.

I mean, I'm one of those.

Yes.

Yeah, I love it.

Me too.

Amazing. Yeah, is there anything else you call out about what you would like to see in the next 6 months, let's say? It sounds like you're going to keep repulling this list.

Yeah.

And at the pace that we've been moving, it feels like, you know, maybe this list will be completely rerun and it'll be all new companies. But then on the other hand, there are companies like Midjourney that for the last 18 months have held strong.

Yeah, I'm very interested to see, especially now that kind of mobile is happening more, what founders can do with audio. As an input mechanism. We talk a lot about AI-generated content and like images, video, songs, all of that is amazing. But if you think about how much content or media you're creating daily, it's probably speaking. And there's a lot of value in what you're saying in a conversation that is not getting captured right now because there's nothing listening to you, transcribing it, formatting it, all of that. If you look at kind of productivity hyperenthusiasts, a lot of them are using these like old school voice dictation devices. And I think that's finally coming to software now due to AI.

Mm-hmm.

It, it's not just a direct transcript of every like um and ah that you said, but it can take a ramble and turn it into a beautiful email.

Totally.

Yes.

Did you see that video? It went viral at one point of some girl just talking to her into ChatGPT.

Yes.

Talking about currency exchanges.

Yes.

Did you see this?

Yes.

And it was the most Yes. Convoluted. And then people were just shocked. They're like, how did ChatGPT understand all that?

It's absolutely amazing. And I think, yeah, ChatGPT Voice is like an incredible product and there will be more products like that and more kind of tailored and vertical products. Another example is a lot of older people are using ChatGPT Voice as kind of a companion throughout their day to tell stories to, to ask questions about, things like that. It's a really interesting use case. Or language translation. There's a lot of people in other countries that are using ChatGPT as their quote unquote like American friend, that they talk about trends, they practice English, things like that. I love all of it, and I think there will be purpose-built products and companies for some of that that can do it even better.

And so on the next mobile list, I'm hoping to see some more things around audio emerge.

Well, as As a podcaster, I am too. If you actually look at the history of the web, you can see like blogs start to form in the early 2000s, and then it took basically a decade for podcast apps and things of the sort. So I feel like we've always been just a little further behind in infrastructure and ecosystem. So I'm also really excited.

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