Where Does Consumer AI Stand at the End of 2025?

For most of the year, less than 10% of ChatCha b t users even visited another one of the big LLM providers. Yeah. When you open Gemini, it has a pop up that says, we got nano banana. Would you like to do something with it? The the little pane where you have to pick something. Yeah. Mhmm. I don't I don't know what to do. Yeah. These are product nuances that I I think makes people actually take the first step. The models have gotten to the level of quality that you can build a real scalable app on top of them. And so the hope is twenty twenty six six will be a huge year for consumer builders. As 2025 comes to a close, consumer AI is starting to look very different than it did at the beginning of the year. A small number of products now dominate everyday usage. New multimodal models have gone viral, and the big labs have pushed harder than ever into consumer experiences. To take stock of the year, the a sixteen z team, Anisha Charya, Olivia Moore, Justine Moore, and Brian Kim, break down what actually worked in 2025 and what didn't. They discuss which model launches and interfaces change user behavior, why small product details matter more than raw model quality, and whether the consumer AI market is trending toward winner take most. The conversation also looks ahead to 2026, where there is still room for startups, how templates and multimodality are reshaping creation, and why this may finally be the moment when scalable consumer AI apps break out. Today, we're talking about who won consumer AI in 2025. This was arguably the year that we saw the big model providers, OpenAI and Google, most out of everyone, make a major push of their own into consumer, both in terms of new models they release, but also in terms of new products, features, and interfaces that target the mainstream user. You might wonder why does it matter who is in the lead here? There are some early signs that the general LLM assistant space might be trending towards winner take all or at least winner take most. So only 9% of consumers are paying for more than one out of the group of ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Cursor. And for most of the year, less than 10% of ChatGPT users even visited another one of the big LLM providers like Gemini. If we had to call it now, ChatGee BT is currently in the lead by far at 800 to 900,000,000 weekly active users. Gemini is at an estimated 35% of their skill on web and about 40% on mobile. And everyone else significantly trails this. So Claude, Grok, Perplexity are all about eight to 10% of the usage. But especially in the last three to six months, things are changing very quickly. With the launch of new viral models like Nano Banana, Gemini is now growing desktop users one users …