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What are consumers doing with the most advanced artificial intelligence? Talking to chatbots, creating virtual characters and sprucing up photos, to name a few uses, according to a recent ranking of popular apps and websites by the venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz.
Tweaking a photo or building a virtual friend may seem frivolous, considering the potential for AI to spur scientific and medical breakthroughs, but tracking monthly users and visitors of generative AI apps and websites is key to understanding AI’s rise.
One major takeaway from the report is that people want general assistants. Popular AI chatbots from OpenAI, Google, xAI and Anthropic are among today’s most popular AI tools.
Top 5 Generative AI Web Products
ChatGPT
Gemini
Deepseek
Grok
Character.ai
Top 5 Generative AI Mobile Apps
ChatGPT
Gemini
AI Gallery
Doubao
Microsoft Edge
Source: The Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps, Andreessen Horowitz
The biggest AI spenders need to make money from consumers to justify a mountain of capital investment. After the launch of OpenAI’s AI chatbot ChatGPT, there was talk of Google falling behind. But Google has swiftly gained ground, with popular AI tools Gemini, Google AI Studio, Google Labs and NotebookLM.
The rankings also show plenty of room for upstarts. Character.ai is among the popular apps for building a virtual companion, highlighting how many people want to create a character for roleplaying. Users can touch up selfies (another popular use) with Hypic and Peachy. Top apps to create and edit art, photos and videos include AI Gallery, Wink, YouCut, PixVerse and BeautyCam.
Then there’s writing assistance, coding assistance, language translation, web search and slideshow creation from tools such as QuillBot, Lovable, Papago, Perplexity and Gamma.
Note that China is gaining ground, with popular tools Quark, Doubao, Kimi and DeepSeek ranking highly. Quark is a general AI assistant owned by Chinese tech giant Alibaba.
Investors will closely watch these trends to see what apps can break through with consumers. And more importantly, which tools can bring in revenue.
This forecast first appeared in The Kiplinger Letter, which has been running since 1923 and is a collection of concise weekly forecasts on business and economic trends, as well as what to expect from Washington, to help you understand what’s coming up to make the most of your investments and your money.Subscribe to The Kiplinger Letter.
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