The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis - The Top GenAI Apps Right Now

Episode Date: March 8, 2025

AI powered apps are growing fast, with ChatGPT, DeepSeek, and coding assistants leading. Reports from SimilarWeb, SensorTower, and A16Z show that AI tools for coding, data analysis, and content creation are getting the most traction. Apps like Cursor, Bolt, and Lovable make building software easier for coders and non-coders. DeepSeek’s chatbot has quickly become a major player, forcing competitors to rethink pricing. Before that in the Headlines, Google cofounder has a new AI startup. Brought to you by:KPMG – Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://kpmg.com/ai⁠ to learn more about how KPMG can help you drive value with our AI solutions.Vanta - Simplify compliance - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://vanta.com/nlwThe Agent Readiness Audit from Superintelligent - Go to https://besuper.ai/ to request your company's agent readiness score.The AI Daily Brief helps you understand the most important news and discussions in AI. Subscribe to the podcast version of The AI Daily Brief wherever you listen: https://pod.link/1680633614Subscribe to the newsletter: https://aidailybrief.beehiiv.com/Join our Discord: https://bit.ly/aibreakdown

Today on the AI Daily Brief, the top Gen AI consumer apps right now. Before that in the headlines, Google co-founder Larry Page is back with a new AI startup. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. To join the conversation, follow the Discord link in our show notes. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief, all the daily AI news you need in around five minutes. We kick off today with some startup news, but not just any startup. Google co-founder Larry Page is, yes, pivoting to. to AI. According to reporting from the information, Page is building a new company called

Dinatomics. The startup, which is still in stealth, will apply AI to product manufacturing. The information writes, Page and a small group of engineers are working on ways to use large language models to create highly optimized designs for a wide variety of objects and then have a factory build them. Not totally clear what that means, but Dinatomics is clearly part of a new wave of companies trying to marry AI to manufacturing to produce next generation products. Another company called Orbital Materials is using AI for advanced materials research to produce technology from batteries to carbon capture devices.

X is providing AI-driven simulations for testing parts of automotive and aerospace applications. Instrumental is one of many using AI Vision to improve monitoring and maintenance processes and factories. And a Page's last project is anything to go by, this new startup will be even more ambitious. From 2016 until 2022, Paige was working on electric flying cars through his company called Kitty Hawk. The startup built over 100 vehicles and had their site set on making the science fiction idea of air taxis a reality. Kitty Hawk CTO Chris Anderson is collaborating with Page Again at Dynatomics's leading engineering efforts.

Certainly should be a fun one to watch. Next up, Christie's Auction House has held their first AI-only art show, and sales, believe it or not, exceeded expectations. The show was extremely controversial in the art world, with 6,500 people signing an open letter urging Christie's to cancel the event. The letter alleged, These models and the companies behind them exploit human artists using their work without permission or payment to build commercial AI products that compete with them. Christie's digital art division felt compelled to address the issue,

responding, the artist represented in this sale all have strong existing multidisciplinary art practices, some recognized in leading museum collections. The works in this auction are using artificial intelligence to enhance their bodies of work. The sale, which finished on Wednesday, offered 34 lots that sold for almost three quarters of a million dollars

in aggregate. It. One of the pieces dated back to the 1980s and was created using a very primitive AI art program that ran on an IBM mainframe and drove physical plotters using ink and paper. Another piece was created in 1966 by Digital Art Pioneer Charles Surrey. He used a mathematical formula and computer code to distort images. The top selling piece was called Machine Hallucinations, ISS Dreams A, by Rafiq Anadol, a pioneer in data visualization and AI art. The artwork involved feeding 1.2 million photos taken by the International Space Station

into a data visualization algorithm to create an abstract video work. The piece sold for $277,000. Following the event, Christy's digital art specialist Nicole Sales Giles said, with this project, our goal was to spotlight the brilliant creative voices pushing the boundaries of technology and art. We also hoped collectors in the wider community would recognize their influence and significance in today's artistic landscape. The results of this sale confirmed that they did.

Lastly, today, after the interesting art world will move over into the boring but necessary market world, where Chipmaker Bruehiker Brum, Broadcom has smashed earnings, reinforcing that AI demand isn't going anywhere. The company reported $4.1 billion in AI-related revenue for last quarter up 78% from Q4 of last year. Their numbers also showed a continued migration of demand towards AI specialized chips. The segment now represents half of the business up from 31% a year ago. Broadcom projected a further 7% gain in AI revenue for the current quarter, suggesting there's no AI bus to be seen.

They've added four additional hyperscaler clients on AI chip designs, complementing their three existing clients involved in large center data operation. After beating the stock down by 22% over the past month, the market love the news. The stock was up 12% in after hours trading on Thursday night. And that, my friends, is going to do it for today's AI Daily Brief Headlines edition. Next up, the main episode. Today's episode is brought to you by Vanta. Trust isn't just earned, it's demanded.

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Don't wait, now is the time to get ahead. Check out real stories from KPMG of how AI is driving success with its clients at KPMG. A.I. Again, that's www.kpmg.org.us slash AI. Now, back to the show. Do you remember when everyone was pejoratively talking about chat GPT rappers? Oh, it's not a real application. It doesn't have any defensibility. It's just a thin layer on top of chat chp t. Now, in certain cases, people weren't wrong to make that critique. Although where it tended to be most applicable was the danger in starting a company based on filling in a feature that something like ChatGPT didn't have yet, but which was clearly going to be on the roadmap. You might remember in

2003 the absolute copious number of chatbots that had PDF readers built in, which of course very quickly became just core functionality table stakes for all of the major chatbots. Well, now there is certainly a big shift. There is a growing sense among investors in Silicon Valley that more of the value than previously thought was going to acquire. to the application layer. Basically, the logic goes that companies that actually understand a particular customer segment, be they organized by some need or a particular business sector, and who can design an experience that utilizes AI to solve a problem or create an opportunity for that specific buyer or a specific user are going to capture a lot of the value. The vibe shift

is certainly real if you glance around from AI products being showed off on X, but luckily we don't just have to rely on vibes. Thanks to recent reports from similar web and sensor tower, we have hard data about which AI apps are growing the fastest. These reports focus on the change in monthly active users over the past three months, so are largely focused on the hot new trends. We also have investment firm Andreessen Horowitz, who have compiled their own analysis of the top 100 Gen AI consumer apps, based both on that data, but also adding additional insights from their position as one of the leading VC firms in the space. Today we're going to dig into what is at the top of these charts, what it says about where the industry is, and what it points to for the future.

First of all, if we start at the very top of the charts, ChadGPT usage continues to boom. OpenAI has now doubled their monthly active users over the past six months. Looking at user growth dating back to 2022's initial launch, you can clearly see that web traffic shows definitive spikes around the launch of new models, as well as around the initial rollout of advanced voice mode. The long initial plateau stemmed from ChatchipT's early novelty factor. Many consumers found it intriguing but lacked compelling daily use cases. However, as OpenAI has introduced more advanced models and capabilities into ChatGBTGBT, useage has risen accordingly, both among existing users and a wave of new adopters. On mobile, the story is a little different,

with numbers growing at a steady and ever-increasing pace. The mobile app was launched in early 2023, so we already had access to GBT4 at that time. More than 40% of usage is now through the mobile app. Overall, ChatGBTGPT now has 400 million monthly active users. And what's more, the company has added 200 million of those in the past six months alone. Now, the big elephant in the room, however, for the last few quarters, was DeepSeek arriving as a breakout hit. The public chatbot generated enough traffic in its first 10 days to rank at number two on the list of top AI products, overtaking, clawed, perplexity, and character AI. The growth numbers from similar web really demonstrate the need to wrap models in a friendly

chatbot interface as a first introduction. Deepseek was already seeing a thousand percent three-month growth in web traffic at the beginning of January around the time they released their V3 Foundation model. By the end of February, however, following the release of R1, growth hit 8,000%. Importantly, A16Z commented, these are not just empty downloads. Per sensor tower data, deepseek users are slightly more engaged on mobile than users of perplexity and clawed, based on both sessions per user and minutes per user in the average week. However, they point out that engagement still significantly trails ChatchipT. One of the things that made Deepseek so notable is, of course, that they offered a much more powerful model as a free version, which forced some

changes to how other companies were thinking about this as well. One of the interesting lenses on the similar web data is a breakdown by segment. Overall, web traffic for AI tools grew at 20% for the first three months ending in February. This growth has slowed down a little from the 38% registered in November. The sectoral analysis, however, is very lumpy. Some segments like customer support, music generation, and writing and content are in outright decline. Others are really hitting their stride.

Data analytics saw 42% three-month growth by the end of February, the fastest paced in September. Human Resources grew at 31% while legal grew at 12%. I think that this says a lot about the shift towards purpose-built verticalized AI solutions, which it seemed like have been a theme, but these numbers really show that to be the case. The fastest growing segment, unsurprisingly, was coding assistance. Growth for this segment accelerated profoundly at the beginning of this year and surged to a high of 83% in late January. It was still surging ahead at 72% by the end of February.

A16Z broke this segment down into two categories, both having a huge moment. The first was Agentic IDE's designed for advanced programmers. Cursor is, of course, the flagship app for this use case, which if you want an idea of how fast things are changing, this is actually the first time cursor has featured on A16Z's top 50 web apps. The other big breakout is vibe coding. In other words, a prompt-based coding where you talk to a tool that does the coding for you, rather than manually typing the code yourself.

Thanks to these text-to-app programs, Replit has that functionality, but some like Bolt and Lovable are both purpose-built for that. With these programs, we're at the stage where a non-coder can spin up a functional app in minutes. Or, as we use it in Super, entire teams of non-technical people can prototype ideas and share clickable, interactable prototypes

rather than just trying to type up different feature ideas or share design mock-ups. Bolt reached 20 million in annualized revenue and 2 million registered users in its first two months, Loveable has reported 17 million in annualized revenue across their first three months. Comparing these two sectors, the top two agentic IDs are outpacing the top two text to app tools, but it's pretty close. Each segment is showing stratospheric growth since the middle of last year. Fascinatingly, but perhaps not unexpectedly when you actually think about it,

the overlap between users of these two types of tools is relatively small. According to Similar Web, just 23% of Bolt's unique users also visited Cursor in January. Could represent that these really are functionally different audiences. Part of this shift in vibe coding is being driven by all these people sharing their interesting examples. Peter Levels, for example, showed off a flight simulator that went viral. The infamous solopreneur cobbled together an online multiplayer game with minimal coding knowledge and a cursor subscription in the space of just a few evenings. He's been adding features and fixing bugs, using Gen.A.I. over the past two weeks,

self-admitting that he has no idea what he's doing. By selling in-game advertising, he's managed to build up $67,000 in MRR in 13 days. Now, it might be a little bit of a stretch to call this actual monthly recurring revenue, given this is a viral hit. It also doesn't hurt that Levels has a significant distribution funnel and was retweeted by Elon Musk, but it still demonstrates the point and the aspiration of these new tools. Another interesting part of the A16Z study was their mapping of the difference between apps that are getting a lot of users and the ones that were generating a lot of revenue.

Setting aside ChatGBT, which is dominating on both levels, AI content production apps with a clear winner. In video editing apps, they noted that the top three by monthly active users were completely separate from the top three by revenue. They also noted that some categories were ranking for revenue but had very few users. Plan identification, nutrition, language learning, music generation, and dictation. Each had either one or two apps that had cornered the market, suggesting that niche AI apps can develop a loyal user base who are willing to pay for tailored services. I think reflecting on this list, every time A16Z drops an update to this, and I believe

this is the fourth edition, the apps that are at the top tend to look a little bit less like the Wild West Weird Beginning experiments and a little bit more like perhaps an expected distribution that you might see in a more mature app segment. Overall, growth continues to be immense, and yet it still feels like we're barely scratching the surface of what's possible. Lots of good stuff to check out in the report that I didn't have a chance to cover here. For now, that is going to do it for today's AI Daily Brief. Appreciate you listening as always, and until next time, peace.