Which AI applications have emerged? Check out the Top 50 AI products with the highest global traffic!

Last November, the release of ChatGPT sparked a wave of interest in generative AI. Now, after nine months, which new companies have emerged? Who could be the next "big winner"?

Venture capital firm a16z (Andreessen Horowitz) has released a report today. Based on web and mobile app traffic data from LikeWeb up until June 2023, the company has ranked the current market's generative AI products and presented the top 50 in the report.

a16z is a private venture capital firm founded in 2009. It invests in early-stage startups and mature growth companies across various industries, with a focus on artificial intelligence, biotech + healthcare, consumer, cryptocurrency, enterprise, fintech, and gaming. Since its establishment, a16z has successfully invested in prominent US internet companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb, Okta, Github, and Stripe. It manages funds exceeding billions of dollars.

ChatGPT Leads by a Wide Margin, Tech Giants Have Less Market Share but High Rankings

There is no doubt that ChatGPT has won the crown in this ranking. Since its launch in November last year, it has broken the record for the fastest application download to exceed 100 million. Although OpenAI's website traffic has declined in the past three months, it still receives a staggering 1.4 billion visits per month, making it one of the most visited websites globally.

Next, Character.AI ranks second. Its unique feature allows users to customize dialogue roles and interact with them on the website. It is worth noting that Character.AI is one of the few products on the list that receives most of its traffic through its app. According to a16z's report, the app traffic accounts for approximately 46% of the total traffic.

Bard takes the third spot. It is an AI chatbot deployed on Google's latest large-scale language model, PalM 2. In July of this year, Google expanded and updated Bard, adding 40 new languages and some new features. According to reports, Google plans to launch a new AI model called Gemini this year to support Bard.

Ranked fourth is Poe, a chatbot on the question-and-answer website Quora. Users can engage in conversations with chatbots built using various large-scale language models, including OpenAI's GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, Google's PaLM, and Meta's Llama 2. QuillBot is the only writing tool that ranks in the top five. Its users are mainly students, and it was launched by the online tutoring website Course Hero in 2017, making it the earliest among the other four products.

It is important to note that this ranking is based solely on traffic data, so it reflects the trends in consumer AI products rather than providing a comprehensive ranking of all AI products or platforms.

The report also shows that ChatGPT accounts for 60% of the monthly traffic among the top 50, with a monthly visit volume of approximately 1.6 billion, ranking 24th in global website traffic.

In addition, 80% of the products on the list are new, with a product history of less than one year. Among the 50 companies on the list, only five are existing products or acquisitions of large technology companies: Bard (Google), Poe (Quora), QuillBot (Course Hero), Pixlr (123RF), and Clipchamp (Microsoft).

What trends does the ranking reveal?

a16z states in the report that this list reveals some market trends in generative AI products:

1. Most leading products are "self-sufficient"

According to PitchBook data, except for the five products owned by tech giants, the remaining 48% of products have no external funding support. These self-sufficient companies may have saved expenses in terms of "technology stack" and do not have their own proprietary models.

The companies on this list can be divided into three categories: (1) training their own proprietary models; (2) fine-tuning existing models; (3) building consumer UI on top of existing models (similar to "GPT wrappers"). Among the top 10 products, half are built based on their own models, four are fine-tuned products, and only one belongs to the "wrapper" category.

2. Large language models dominate, with companions and creative tools on the rise

Chatbots based on large language models (LLMs) account for 68% of the total traffic on the list.

In recent months, two other categories have started to gain significant usage: AI companions (such as Character.AI) and content generation tools (such as Midjourney and ElevenLabs).

In the broader category of content generation, image generation is the primary use case, accounting for 41% of the traffic, followed by consumer writing tools (26%) and video generation (8%). （3）Early "winners" have emerged, while most categories are still up for grabs

Although ChatGPT is far ahead, in terms of categories, the difference in traffic between the first and second-ranked companies in each category is close to 1x, and companies ranked on the list have been growing at an average monthly rate of 50% over the past 6 months, so it is highly possible for the first-ranked company to be surpassed.

One obvious trend is the fragmentation of product categories. Products built for specific use cases or workflows are developing alongside more general tools, and they show signs of being successful companies as well.

（4）Free traffic dominates, high willingness to pay from users

Riding the AI wave, most companies are able to gain substantial free traffic and increase their reputation without paid marketing.

Data also shows that only 2% of the bottom quarter of traffic for these generative AI products comes from paid sources. In contrast, according to a16z's benchmarking of 150 products, paid traffic for non-AI consumer subscription companies accounts for 70%.

（5）Web vs Mobile: Web takes the lead

Currently, consumer AI products are primarily accessed through web browsers rather than apps. On one hand, browsers are the natural starting point for reaching the widest consumer audience, and on the other hand, many AI companies have small teams that cannot simultaneously focus their attention and resources on web, iOS, and Android.

Only 15 companies on the list have real-time mobile apps, and compared to the web, less than 10% of the total monthly traffic comes from apps.