a16z Podcast - The Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps

Episode Date: March 10, 2026

Anish Acharya speaks with Olivia Moore about the latest edition of the a16z Top 100 AI Apps report. They cover why ChatGPT is still 30 times bigger than Claude on web, how the three major platforms are specializing for different users, what global adoption data reveals about cultural attitudes toward AI, and why agents, memory, and voice are about to change everything.   Resources: Follow Anish Acharya on X: https://twitter.com/illscience Follow Olivia Moore on X: https://twitter.com/omooretweets Stay Updated:Find a16z on YouTube: YouTubeFind a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Show on SpotifyListen to the a16z Show on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg 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. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The cultural change and the cultural adoption will be slower than the technology change in what's actually possible. If you actually look at the app stores that are emerging on Claude and ChatGBT. They both have 200 plus apps, but there's only 11% overlap. Essentially, you'd be able to log in with your ChatGBTGT account and take your memory and your tokens with you. And then that other product would be able to kind of borrow those things to be even more powerful and helpful for you. I don't think we've seen a social product yet to succeed. That's like entirely AI content. The emotional stakes just feel lower in some ways.

ChatGPT is the biggest AI product in the world. It's also only reaching 10% of the global population on a weekly basis. We're still early. Six additions into the A16C top 100 AI action port, the platforms are diverging. Claude is doubling down on prosumer tools. Gemini's traction tracks almost perfectly to creative model releases. And ChatGBTGBT is building towards something that looks more like Google,

and everything at that monetizes through ads, transactions, and subscriptions. The global data is surprising. Singapore, Hong Kong, and the UAE lead per capita AI usage. The U.S. sits at number 20. Trust in AI varies wildly, from 32% in the U.S. to 80%. in China. Anisha Chariah, General Partner at A16Z, speaks with Olivia Moore, partner at A16Z. Olivia, welcome. Thanks for having me. It's the most exciting time of the year, which is the top 100 report, is coming out today, I think. Is that right? Yep. It's been six editions over three years. Talk to us about what's the same, what's changed, what's your excitement level, what's up with the report.

Yeah, in many ways, like so much has changed and there's been just an incredible amount of growth since the the first time we put out this list in 2023. On the other hand, from like a macro level, we're still so early. Like, Chatsubit is by far the biggest global AI product and still only 10% of the global population is using it on a weekly active basis. So there's like a lot more to come. I do think this past six months has been maybe my favorite time and the most exciting time because of the shifts that we've seen.

One of them has been that the race for the consumer is really heating up. So Chachy BT, of course, but also Gemini and Claude are kind of doubling down on their own ICP within consumer and prosumer. And I think we're starting to see how these platforms might have compounding advantages over time. And so that makes it especially kind of existential or interesting of who is acquiring the most users. And then on a related note, this was actually the first issue that we included products that were non-AI native, but are now majority AI enabled. So things like Canva, Notion, FreePick. Notion actually announced that now they think half of their new ARR is driven by AI-first features, which is very cool. And then lastly, I think we've seen a big expansion of AI outside of just like the website or app prompt box.

So we have all of the browsers that have come out like Dia, Comet, Atlas. We have Claude and Excel, PowerPoint, and Chrome. And then we have desktop apps like cursor, whisper flow, granola. And so there's been just a really kind of exciting explosion in the ways that people are using AI. So exciting. There's a ton to cover here. So let's start with the big foundation models.

Can you talk a bit about what you think are the respective areas of specialization for Gemini, Quad, and then, of course, chat, GPT? Because it feels like it's been a rising tide story more than these models trading off with each other. Yes, I agree. Despite the drama maybe of the past week where we have Katie Perry taking sides on Twitter in the LLLM war, which is something that I didn't ever see coming.

I think at a base level still, if you look at AI usage, like chat GPT is a very, very clear winner. So on web, they're 2.7 times bigger than Gemini. On mobile, they're 2.5 times bigger than Gemini. And then despite, again, like the kind of tech Twitter discourse, Claude, they're almost 30 times bigger than Claude on web. And almost 80 times bigger than Claude on mobile. So we had seen that Sam Altman tweet back in the Super Bowl ad wars era. The Texas tweet. Yes.

He was like, we have more people using chat chb-t free version in Texas than Claude has all users globally, which is true. That being said, I think we are seeing, I don't think bifurcation is the right word, but maybe expansion in the number of products people are using and what they're using different products for, which has kind of changed the market share a little bit. Cloud in particular is really doubled down on prosumer with things like co-work, Claude Code, Claude and Excel and PowerPoint. point, if you actually look at the app stores that are emerging on Claude and ChatGBT BT, they both have 200 plus apps, but there's only 11% overlap. Like, Cloud is very much doubling down on like premium data sources, research tools, science tools, financial data, and ChatGBTBT is really doubling down on like consumer marketplaces, travel, nutrition, consumer finance, things like that. And then Gemini is kind of in its own little corner as well.

And the traction has largely been driven by creative tools. So if you look at their kind of active users and paying users, it's nearly perfectly correlated to releases of like V-O-3, Nano-Banavana-1, Nano-Banana Pro, Nano-Banana 2. They're doing a little more in ProSumer. They're adding AI to Gmail, sheets, calendar. But that's all being captured by, like, their existing products versus, like, a net new experience.

Maybe let's dig into the App Store dynamic a little bit because that's so fascinating. Can you talk about the bull case for Chat-GPT? with, I think, what they call the apps directory? Yeah, yeah. I think the approach we're seeing with ChatGBT. And Sam said this himself on Twitter, is we want to be the AI for everyone.

And that means that they're trying to acquire every consumer and they'll monetize them in different ways. So, like, I think Claude has been very clear that they're just going to monetize via subscriptions, which is great for people and companies who can pay for subscriptions, but it won't be everyone. I think you see that with the plugins

that they're leaning into, which are, like, paid high ACV, like work data, tools. Similar web, things like that. Yeah, things like that. Like pitchbook, like things that you'd use if you're an investor or a scientist and mathematician. And Chachibati, I think, is going more of the somewhat of a Google type approach in that they're building things that like the average person will want to use. And maybe a smaller percentage of those convert to subscriptions right now, but they will be able to monetize those people through ads and probably also, I would guess, through transactions. Like if they're building the gateway to book a trip or do all of these other kind of long-tail consumer purchases, hypothetically, they should eventually be able to take some kind of cut of that, at least for the traffic that they're driving. And so I think that that is the bull case for the chat, GBT, App Store that isn't yet showing up in the data that will probably become like even more evident in the next year or two. Yeah, it's really interesting because it touches on your point in the report about compounding advantages and how context compounds. Can you talk a little bit about that concept?

And then what's your proxy in terms of a metric for it? Is it session time? Is it a number of sessions? Is it the amount of data you've provided or is there something else? Yeah. This is a really exciting question to me because I think thus far with these horizontal LLMs like Chachy-B-T, Claude, Gemini, perplexity, we've kind of lived in a world where the context and the memory is somewhat easily exportable.

Claude ran a campaign around this recently. But I think there's going to be increasing lock-in. And I do think that probably actually benefits the broader, more horizontal tools like chat chabit for a few reasons. So I think, one, we've already seen chat chabit focus on or start to build out products where you interact with other people on them through the platform. So the group chats. Like imagine if there's an even more successful version of chat chabit group chats and all of your friends are on there, then if you wanted to turn from chat chabit, you'd also have to convince them all to go through another product. Exactly. I would see the second one is kind of also like an Apple, Google comparison in that as these app stores emerge,

it is likely that developers might start to concentrate their time and effort in who they build for in the most sophisticated way, who they ship to first, depending on who has the most users. Or maybe in some cases who's the most willing to pay, but for a lot of these consumer tools, it'll be who has the most users. So I think that also benefits chat chabit. And then the other thing probably that I'm most excited for this year that Sam Altman had kind of hinted at is this like authentication with chat ChbT layer. So essentially you'd be able to log in with your chat ChbT account and take like your memory and your tokens with you. And then that other product would be able to kind of borrow those things to be even more powerful and helpful for you. And if that's the case, then you're wanting to have more of your core identity live on ChachyBT because,

then it can lend it to these other tools that are even better for you. It's so smart and it really plays to their advantages in that they have signups for 900 million people. And then the third-party developer ideally would not want to pay for the inference. Yes. So the user can bring their inference capacity with them.

There's an advantage for the developer. ChatGPT gets the lock-in. The user gets the benefit of personalization and it all kind of works. Yes, I totally agree. The one question mark I still have on this that I think could play both positive and negative in terms of increasing lock-in for the consumer product is what your work goes with,

like what your enterprise contract is. So, for example, in some ways, it's good for me if my company uses chat EBT for work because then I know how to use the product. And as a normal consumer, they might have tried one or two AI products, so they're more likely to be comfortable and keep using something that they've already used. On the other hand, some people might not want to mix identity and mix memory across their personal. and work use cases. True.

And so I'm really interested, I think Open AI hinted at this recently, but I'm really interested in how we kind of segment memory across different personas that are within yourself that are using these products. Don't cross the streams. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Well, maybe actually switching gears to Gemini for a moment. You know, I think about the kind of just the vibes around Google with their early AI products, barred, which they'll never live down. Some tough times there. To where we are today with product. like nanobanana, like even naming it nanobanana is such a perfect microcosm for how far Google has come. Yeah.

And it seems like they have a lot of intentions around multimodality. Yeah. What's your assessment of their approach? I've been impressed. I think they have been hesitant, maybe in some ways more hesitant in the same ways is exactly what we would expect, so to kind of bake AI into the core features because there's a risk of either cannibalizing their own product or like there are so many people who are. have used these tools for 10, 20, 30, 40 years.

And so the switching cost there is like a little bit high. They don't want to scare users when AI is suddenly popping up in everything, which I understand. But what they've done a really, really good job at is these new creative products that are basically very model driven from the deep mind team, who I think is generally fantastic. I think notebook L.M was actually the first look at this. and that was something truly new in like consumer AI audio. And now we have the image and video models. So in some ways with a big company like this, they kind of have to get out of their own way

in terms of being able to actually innovate. And it seems like they are. But you also worked at Google, so I'd be curious. Well, it's interesting to just, I'm glad you brought a notebook, because notebook is sort of this greenfield area within product area within the company, so you don't have 10 VPs fighting over it.

And as a result, I think just the progress on notebook has been tremendous. You know, they just launched a video generation feature that helps visually demonstrate all the concepts in your sort of workspace, which is cool. Conversely, when you look at the existing product surfaces like sheets or docs, there's just so much, one sort of momentum and inertia from the past,

but then management overhead around those. It's harder for them to do anything other than the most obvious incremental thing. Yes, I agree. We'll see what happens there in the next few years. I feel like they're going to put up a fight on some of those products because they don't want to lose

that user base. But to your point, they're already locked in with so many enterprises that they might not have to do that much, at least in the near term, to kind of keep up.

You know, implicit in this conversation as we experience and talk a lot about AI in the West. Yeah. Talk a bit about the sort of global AI trends. There was a few surprising things I saw in there.

We kind of expanded our scope in terms of what we looked at for this report, which ended up being, like, very fun and interesting. Two things that are, are probably obvious in terms of how they differ from the rest of the world, would be Russia and China.

So Russia, I think China, everyone knows, like a ton of AI products are kind of censored or banned. And so almost all of the usage, they actually have the lowest combined Chatsy, BT, and Gemini usage of any country. It's only 15%. So they're mostly using, like, Dao Bao, which is made by Bite Dance, Deep Seek, Quinn, Kimi, those kinds of models. The somewhat of a surprise to me was that Russia actually is a very, very similar story where they have also their own kind of parallel AI ecosystem out of necessity because they have some level of sanctions and things like that that prevent them from using all the U.S.-based tools. So we've seen products like Gigachat and Yandex, which are Russia-specific built by Russian, often state-affiliated companies, have big, big usage there, and then Deep Seek.

So Russia is the number two market for Deep Seek after China. And so if you look at the kind of like per country adoption data, like, yes, there's some blips where like this country uses Claude a little bit more. This country uses Gemini a little bit more. But the two huge outliers are Russia and China. And those are like big, big markets. And so I think it's worth watching what's going on there. It's interesting, though, because both Russia and China, they're outliers because of restrictions around how models can be used and maybe cultural preferences. Are there any other countries that have geospecific trends,

or is this a sort of global AI behavior set? Yeah. I would say in terms of like model development, proprietary model development that allows you to deploy proprietary AI products, most of that research is coming out of the U.S. and China, maybe a little bit out of Russia. Okay. I think we are seeing a few kind of native ecosystems in other places. I would, Korea has a couple of their own,

products like Navor and Kakao that have built out nice kind of LLM interfaces. India is probably the other one that I watch really closely just because there's so many people that you can have standalone big companies focused on India. The other interesting thing about India is there's so many different languages, like such a range that both LLM products and even voice products don't necessarily support very well. Like it's a worse experience if you're a primary user of one of those languages and you're trying to use something like a chat chupit. So so far, we haven't seen a huge amount of variance there yet, but I would not be surprised

maybe to see more founders, even from the U.S., like targeting the Indian market for AI. And then the other thing I wanted to mention, we did for the first time also kind of, like a heat map essentially, of which countries are adopting AI the most and the least on a per capita basis. So we looked across like the 10 biggest LLM products to see on Webber. mobile to see what this might look like. So Singapore is number one. Crazy. Yes. Then Hong Kong, then the UAE, then South Korea. The U.S. is down at number 20. So not super low, not incredibly high. Russia and China are like very far down the list, like sub 50. And there's a lot of interesting stories, I think, that live in that data.

Yeah. The first one is if you think about those top five, like Singapore, South Korea, to Hong Kong. It's a very, like, the demographics of the workforce are very, like, tech-first, white-collar high skill. And the U.S. has a giant chunk of jobs where AI hasn't really touched them yet, like retail and transportation and some of these other things. I think also the cultural norms around AI are shockingly diverse. If you're in the U.S., you have probably internalized this ongoing angst and questioning around. Yeah, I was going to ask about that. Take my job.

100%. Or, you know, AI is terrible for artists or all of these other things that make people pick up or not pick up AI. Yes. There was actually a big survey last year from Edelman, the global media company. And the U.S. had a fairly low rate of trust in AI. It was like 32%. And most of these other countries that are high on the list are like 50, 60, 70%. So that, I think, has also held the U.S. back.

Despite the fact that we are where the biggest products come from are per capita usage is lower than a lot of these other markets that have maybe smaller populations but have embraced it more. I think that's exactly right. You know, I was reading that in China the sort of favorability views on AI are 80%. Yeah. 80% hold a favorable view. And I know UAE and Singapore, I think they've sort of culturally wired to be tech optimistic. Yes. Which is an advantage. Yes. Yes. Definitely. It's interesting to see some of these smaller countries like the per capita adoption rate. Like in the U.S., it's around probably a third of people are monthly active users of something like a chat CBT.

Yeah. And even some of like the European countries or Eastern Europe, it's like 50, 45, 60 percent on smaller bases, but they've kind of embraced it more quickly than we have here. Yeah, really interesting. You know, one thing that I'm sort of watching and I'm interested in is as you look at the spectrum of AI from the most functional, almost like a Google search replacement to the most cultural, creative, personal, we should see more divergence country by country because obviously the culture, the movies they make in India couldn't be more different than the movies they make in China or the

U.S. So why wouldn't their use of creative tools be different? Yeah. And this is honestly part of the reason why we started looking at the geographic segmentation in this report is because for the first two and a half, three years of generative AI, the vast majority of consumers were maybe interacting with one product. And now it's broadening quite a bit. And I think that we've will see more of these market-specific tools. And if they are, if they capture enough of that market, like some of these Russian companies or Chinese companies, they can actually surface up to the global list if it's kind of the market is big enough. Talk a bit about the evolution of creative tools and how much do you think that that is that a reflection of culture, is that driving culture?

When do we cross that threshold? The creative tools trend has been fascinating. I mean, obviously the first big generative AI product was actually mid-jurney, which came out. before chat sheep. True. That's right. Yeah. And in our first few editions of the list, it was very much dominated by creative tools. And I've said this before,

but the creative tools benefit from kind of hallucination of the early models because they produce things that are more kind of surprising or beautiful or original. And so for a while, those are the only things working in consumer AI, really. Now it's shifted a lot. Creative tools are still a huge chunk of the list, but like the type of creative tool that is a

standalone big business has changed. I would say the biggest change is we're seeing fewer standalone image generators. A lot of this activity, if you're making like a basic commodity image, like, you know, a meme or a basic marketing image or an infographic, like the core models in Chat ChachyBT and Gemini are quite good at those things now. Yeah. So the products that are still surfacing on the list, like an ideogram or a mid-jury, are either very aesthetically opinionated

or they have very more sophisticated workflows that you can't get on something like a chat chippy T. Contrasting that, I would say, like music, voice, video, all seem to be things that the model, the biggest model companies have maybe invested less in. And so we've seen players like Suno and music and 11 labs in voice kind of completely break out and rise to top 20, top 50,

on the list and then like hold their spot there over time. And then there's like a compounding lock-in from like the community and, you know, the big base of enterprise customers and all of that. Video is where I have the most questions. OpenAI has been investing in it with SORA and of course Google with VEO, but the Chinese models are so good because they can train on any data. So C-Dance 2 is probably the best example of this where it's just kind of in some way's head and shoulders above what the U.S. companies have thus far been able to do.

So I think we'll see. I think this actually benefits platforms like a KREA where you can use all the models in one place because my sister, Justine, wrote an article about this. But the way video is shaping out, it's unlikely to be like one model to rule them all. And so you kind of need to be able to switch between them. That seems true of most of the model spaces, you know? Chat models, creative models, even code models have their areas of specialization You know, people talk about kind of ergonomics of opus versus the accuracy of codex.

Yes. And that's just, that's a tradeoff. You know, and you have to choose what tool you want to use for which problem. Yeah, absolutely. SORA is really interesting to me because it represented both a sort of a big step forward in the model, but also a really ambitious experiment around social. And there was data in the early days of SORA, like the percentage of people that were creating, which was dramatically 10x higher than we'd seen before.

Yeah. You know, what's your kind of assessment of the SORNs? SORA social effort versus the model effort? And where do you see that going? SOR is so fascinating and I think was a very interesting early experiment that I think taught us all a lot about kind of both creative tools, but also maybe more importantly, what consumer social in the AI era might look like. So by the numbers, they had a massive launch.

They were number one on the App Store, the U.S. App Store for 20 consecutive days, which is very hard to do. It means you're probably getting, to be number one on the app store, you probably have to get these days 150,000 daily days. download. So it's like a high download volume. And they actually hit a million users faster than Chachypte itself. So like huge launch. And actually, I think what a lot of people underestimate is it still is very significant usage. So three million Dow's per sensor tower, which is not bad at all. What has dropped off about SORA is the new downloads. So there may be, they peaked like six million a month

in November. It's looking like a million and a half now. I think. the, what has really worked about SORA is that it's a very good video model. And they kind of innovated and introduced this concept of cameos, which is where a real person can grant their likeness to Sora so that they and others can generate videos of them. So like a lot of people in the early days were doing like mean videos of their friends, like Jake Paul went viral because he was the first big celebrity to like lean into Sora. So you were seeing like insane Jake Paul videos everywhere. Yeah. I mean, honestly, good for him. Yes. Yes. I think what worked less about SORA is that because the content was exportable,

people would take it to TikTok, they would take it to Instagram Reels, they would take it to YouTube, and there it competed against the best human-made content. And so the overall feed experience was just better because you were seeing the best of both, not just like the best of SORA. I don't think we've seen a social product yet succeed

that's like entirely AI content. the emotional stakes are just feel lower in some ways. Right. And so I would imagine we'll see more examples like these where Soros still has clearly very, very significant usage in revenue as a creative tool, but not so much as a social app. Right.

And I don't know if there'll be, there probably will be a massive AI native social network, but we haven't seen what it looks like just yet, I would say. It'll be interesting, you know, we discuss this frequently, but every social product has a status game. Yes. You know, and on Insta, it's maybe be the hottest. and on X, it's be the most interesting.

And it felt like the emerging status game on Sorrow was be the funniest. Yes. I think this is one of the reasons why it's hard for the content to cross over. Yeah. Because it's just two different ways of judging what is interesting and great. I agree. What they might do, if I had to imagine where they might find more of a niche, they have now inked a bunch of deals with big media companies like Disney.

And so if Sora is the only place where you can make, like, licensed, like, fan videos of like beloved kind of characters and entertainment figures, then like that's very interesting. Totally. But we're early, I think, in how that rules out. It's so early. I know. We keep saying it.

Yeah. Okay, let's switch gears. We can't have this conversation without talking about agents. Yeah. You know, quad bot, molt book. I know. What was the other one? Claudebot, open claw, had a name in the interim.

Let's cut that. Yeah. In any case, we can't have this conversation without talking about agents, OpenClaw, Manus, Jen Spark, Mold Book. Give us an overview of what has happened in the last 60 days in the world of agents. And what does a report tell us? I think this is mostly why I say the last, you know, even six months, but actually even two months of this report have been like the most interesting that I think we've seen. So Open Claw actually, as you'll see, is not on our rankings because it blew up in February. Our data ends in January. But we did pull the data for February. And if it

had been eligible, it would have been number 30 on our web list, which is a pretty big debut. I think the really interesting thing about OpenClaw is the usage has just continued to accelerate in the technical community. So now it's, I think, number one, GitHub stars of all time. It passed React, it passed Linux. It's a really really important. Yes. Holy cow. Very impressive. But in terms of overall new users, it's kind of plateaued. So we looked at kind of visits to the get started or signup page. And that is kind of flat week over week since early February, which I think indicates that, like, it is an amazing product if you're technical. It has not yet fully escaped containment to non-technical people, which, of course, is like a bigger population. They were acquired by Open AI.

So if I had to guess or what I'd love to see Open AI do is build, like, product ties open claw into something that is usable for a mainstream consumer. And I think we've also just seen the ideas behind the open claw architecture inspire so many other founders. Like how many pitches do we take a day where the founder is like, I want to be open claw for this? Absolutely. Open claw made me realize this was possible. Yes. And so I think we're going to see OpenClaw itself will continue to succeed and be a massive product. And I'm guessing we'll see more kind of like verticalized focused versions of OpenClaw for different use cases.

Yeah, it's so interesting because it feels like one of the things that makes OpenClaught, works so well as it can operate across all models in all directions. Yes. And I sort of wonder if it dilutes the value of open claw to have it be sole model provided and therefore it's sort of counter positioned against labs. Totally. Yeah. They've kept it, I think, multi-model for now, at least in my usage.

So we'll see how it trends. I think it would be smart to keep it that way for usage. Yeah. Is Manis the consumer-grade open-claw or how do you distinguish the two? Yes. Some might say that. And I do actually think, so Manus made our web list. And of course, they had a $2 billion plus acquisition by META, also in the course of the list.

Incredible growth, like the ramp that they reported from like zero to $100 million, 200 million ARR in the span of like, honestly, six, nine months is really kind of best in class. My view on why MANIS was so successful was it was really the first consumer-grade agent that could actually operate fairly autonomously across products and platforms. So you could connect email, you could have it browse the local, web and it would it could make slides it could make spreadsheets I spent a lot of time in the early days trying like this was a year ago chat GPT operator or google's project mariner yeah and none of them were reliable and manis was a breakthrough in kind of agent reliability and agent accessibility for the

consumer I think the fact that they did the acquisition is interesting in terms of where this is going in that once everyone has that agentic capability, and you might imagine they will if it's kind of based on the core underlying models, then it's actually, if you're such a horizontal product, you may be better off with the distribution forces of a meta or a Google or something like that versus a standalone company. That's definitely not true if you're building something more vertical. But if you imagine that like Google now has the resources to create a manis, then that's a really hard thing to keep fighting against as a startup, I think. And obviously the big companies have a billion different priorities, so they're not going to do everything

best in class. But it's why I've generally been a little more cautious about the very, very horizontal consumer AI apps, just because it's probably both in scope for the, for the bigger companies. And they have the advantage of already having IT approval. and enterprise contracts and all of that. Right. Right. It is interesting that we sort of crossed this cultural threshold, though. Yes.

Where Manus seemed like a non-obvious bet in terms of just the breadth of the offering. Yeah. And now it seems like they're living in the future a little bit. Yes, absolutely. They were, it's obviously an incredible engineering team. Like the quality of the product was like three, six months ahead of the rest of the market, which is not easy to do when you're competing with teams of like thousands of researchers. Totally.

Let's use this to kind of. a leg into a conversation about other horizontal AI products, things that live beyond the sort of web window? Yes. What are you seeing there? Yeah, that has been a massive theme. When I think about the products that I interact with on a daily basis in the AI world, quite a few of them are actually desktop apps, like things like granola, voice dictation

tools, Claude Co-work, those kinds of things. And it does become a methodology problem for our report because we can track website visits very well. And so we can track the first time that they download that desktop app. We can track mobile app usage very well. We cannot track desktop usage that closely. And I think that is increasingly as AI products become more sophisticated, having them live in their own dedicated application, much of which will run on desktop because it can interact with your files and it can be more ambient. I think that's going to happen more and more. And so I think moving forward, finding us finding ways to parallel track ranking these products by web and mobile usage,

but also by revenue is going to be a pretty good idea. Because if you think about things like cursor, some of the consumer, prosumer AI apps that are generating the most revenue have very few, very little usage on web. It's almost all in kind of a dedicated app. Yeah, it's really interesting. It also feels like the fact that Open AI released Atlas and Anthropic released co-work shows you where their priorities are. Yes, definitely. I fully agree. The AI browser debate is his own interesting thing. I feel like we're still in the early to mid phases of how that's going to play out. And I think the instinct behind an AI native browser is right in that if you can have AI be kind of always on, always available, ambient in where you're spending a lot of your time online, like that's a good opportunity. Perplexity comment, I think, actually led the way there. It's a great product.

It's a great product. And the interesting thing is if you look at kind of the highest spike for Comet and Atlas in terms of visits to the download page, Comet is five times ahead of Atlas, which is wild because ChachyBT's audience is like so massive. Normous, yeah. And I think what we've seen is like Comet and Atlas still have very dedicated, excited user bases. but for the average consumer, the switching cost of a browser is non-trivial just because, like, you have workflow set up. You naturally just open this one app. And so it not only has to be like feature parity, there has to be one or two features of the AI browser that are really killer and that are easy enough for the average person to set up an access.

And I don't think that we've seen that quite yet. You know, it's really interesting because Sam said, I think six months ago on a pod, you know, is somebody who was asking him, what has surprised you the most. And he said, it's that the world hasn't changed more. Yeah. And if you look at the trends around how people are using chat GPT at scale, it's still, you know, homework and Google-like queries and a little bit of companionship.

In a sense, something like a browser gives you an opportunity to point the user in a different direction. What's your view on how the average person is using AI today? Yeah. I think a couple of things. So one, I feel like teenage girls are like the best source of what is happening in consumer. will be happening in the consumer.

If you look at all of the biggest consumer outcomes, like they were the early adopters of all of these products. And so there was actually a Pew Research study fairly recently on how teenagers are using AI. Now, finally, I think for the first time, over half of them are admitting to using it for their homework. So the real number is probably like 99.99% but some of them didn't want to get in trouble with their parents.

38% are now using it for a creative tool. So editing images, editing video, generating images in video. And then this like emerging slightly longer tail, but I think will ultimately be amongst the biggest behaviors, 16% are using it for just like casual conversation, like not the intense companion products, but like just having someone to talk to. And then 12% are using it for like emotional support and advice. I think all of these use cases will like asymptote around probably 100% ultimately. And so those are behaviors that maybe have been less well served by products so far and will be going forward, whether it's on a Chachibit

or whether it's on like a standalone product. And then the other big thing that I'm looking out for is agents. Like I think basically... Are teenage girls going to use agents? Come on. So here's the thing. I think that agents, similar to like how in 1990, an internet company was like a dot-com company, right? Or a tech company, like dot com was its own designator. I think that this is what's going to happen with agents where ultimately like every tech company was a dot com company. Like I think ultimately every AI company and then every tech company is going to be an agenda company because that's just where the models are headed. And if you can deliver outcomes and not just kind of inputs to your users as a software product, that's so much more compelling.

So yes, I think 13 year old girls will be using agents, but they will not think of them as agents. But I think it does unlock a lot of these other consumer use cases. of AI like finance, health care, travel planning, complex shopping even, where pre-agents, there was just so much data you had to go out and grab and do it reliably and do it across systems that it like wasn't really possible. And now it is. And so I think we're going to see an explosion of those other use cases in the next few months. How long do you think it takes to play out?

I mean, is everybody using their own open claw in 12 months? Is that five years away? Is that the wrong mental model? Like where? When we have this conversation. Perhaps in six months at the next top 100, what does the world look like? I feel like every time I predict something, it happens much more quickly that I would have thought, which I think is what we're seeing every day and that startups are growing faster than they ever have.

I think people, there's still the cultural change and the cultural adoption will be slower than the technology change and what's actually possible. And so I think what we'll continue to see is this early wave of, often technical, sometimes not technical, AI adopters, like lead the charge on a behavior that then six months later everyone else is doing. One good example of this that I'm very, very excited about is voice, which we've talked about a lot. We have talked about voice.

To me, it's like the most information-dense, high-quality source of basically media that we have. Like so much of what you do every day is actually downstream or upstream of like what you say. And we're, I think, for the first time in the past six months have seen first engineers and now other people within tech companies adopt things like voice dictation. Now it's kind of almost a norm at many companies that your meetings are going to be kind of recorded and transcribed by an AI. Whether that's voice dictation, whether that's like a voice pin that answers questions or does tasks for you, I think that is going to spread to the mainstream consumer in the next six to nine months. Really, really interesting.

Maybe to close, can you talk a little bit about memory? Yes. And where you see that going? Yes. Memories, as we mentioned early right now, and it can be a little bit jarring in that Claude and chat GPT in particular are very good at this. Even Gemini, Google has launched something called Personal Intelligence, where it now can pull information it knows about you from your docs, email, et cetera, to, like, serve you better with AI

across all of the apps. And like I said, it can be a little bit. drawing now because many people are talking to AI about everything, personal and professional. And so it can sometimes kind of inadvertently cross the line of like what it knows about you to try to help you better, but in the wrong context. So I think there's a lot of work to do kind of on like the infrastructure side almost of like how we sort out who someone is in every context. Once that is settled, I think that memory will be one of the core advantages for AI products,

whether it's their own memory or like chat chagipT lending memory, any product that you start to use two years from now, if it doesn't immediately feel like it knows you, it will feel broken. Like the concept of like onboarding to a product should not be something that exists in a couple of years. And I think that that is something that memory is really going to enable. I see it personally for myself where I talk to AI all day,

talk to several AIs all day. And the way that they interact with me, and the kind of value that they're able to provide has been so much higher two or three months in than it is when you start using it. Incredible. Well, I don't know what the future holds, but it's going to be weird and wonderful.

I'm excited for it. Yes. Olivia, thank you so much. It was super fun to actually have this conversation today and go through the report. Any closing comments? No, I'm just excited for people to read it. There's a lot of interesting data in there next time,

and I'm sure it will look wildly different six months from now. So we'll be back then. Really exciting. Well, tell us what you think, and thanks for checking us out. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z podcast. If you like this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review, and share it with your friends and family.

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