a16z's Consumer AI Top 100: vibe coding explodes, companion apps dominate, Google has 4 entries

Always great to catch up. California to fix the one so we can drive scenically in the future. Thank you so much for hopping on. Our next guest is in the reream waiting room, Olivia Moore from Andre Horowitz. How are you doing? What's happening? Hello, it's great to see you guys. Thanks for having great to see you.

I was just sharing with the team the news today, but you break it down for us first. What are you announcing today? Yeah. So, we're announcing what we call the consumer AI top 100, uh, which is where we literally Thank you. I appreciate when other people are this excited about data as I am. We love data.

We live for market maps. Yes. Yes.

This one has I would say it's market map adjacent in that we every single website and every single mobile app around the world in kind of descending order of traffic and then we pick out the top 50 in each that are AI native companies to just get a look at what consumers are actually using.

I consider myself a bit of a list connoisseur myself. Actually, I enjoy making lists from time to time. Uh I'm sure you get yourself in hot water with this list. People are going to say, "Take me off this list. I want to be under the radar. Put me on this list. I want uh I'm doing better than that other company on here.

Uh talk about the methodology. Uh how confident are you? Is there an element of like vibe and curation? Is this like the New York Times bestseller list or is this No, there's no element of vibes. It's all data.

So we literally for the web list we go we have a provider called Similar Web and we literally just look at monthly number of visits. Yep. We pick the first 50 that are AI.

And then on the mobile list, we do um sensor tower and we pick the top 50 by monthly active users, but we do get lots of uh fun texts, emails, inquiries of people either wondering about their rankings or wanting to be on the list. So, I'm happy to inform everyone that it is completely unbiased.

There are some things on here that stand out to me as uh completely unsurprising. ChachiPT number one, Gemini number two, Deep Sea, Grock up there. Uh that seems obvious to me. Uh stuff that's standing out are specifically tool like hyper specific tools like remove background, remove BG. I've actually used that tool.

Janitor AI is number eight. Yeah. What else stuck out to you as surprising? What did you learn? Yeah. Every time there's um apps that are kind of like literally single purpose, remove. bg is a great example.

It was a company that was acquired by Canva but grew to like 32 million monthly active users literally by being the best product to upload a photo and get the background removed from it. And it's a catchy URL that people remember so it keeps getting usage. Yep.

The janitor one is a good call out too because one of the surprises for me list after list is how many companion products make the list. Like it's always a dozen or so each time. Janitor is one of them and one of the highest ranking ones behind character. So it doesn't seem to be this looks cuz you don't know.

It looks very uh grock x aai. I would have thought janitor would be like back office B2B like I I I thought that would be something to clean up my data warehouse. Uh but you're telling me that it is in fact a companion of some sort. Interesting. I also see spicy chat. ai.

That sounds like something we shouldn't push pull up on this stream. Cushion. ai has a has a heart there that seems little uh suspicious. Juicy chat. These there are a lot of these uh use cases there. Um is this a new thing? Is this the first time you've done the top 100?

Uh like what are the biggest movers that you're noticing or or that you expect? Yeah, this is the fifth list. We do it every six months. So we've done it for about two years now. We started it like six months after Chat GBT came out. Um interestingly, there's 14 companies that have made every single list.

Most of them are in kind of creative tools. So think like Midjourney and 11 Labs. Sure. Quite a few of them are general LLM players like FGBT, Perplexity, PO. Yep. Um, one of the big I say surprise, but probably not a surprise to anyone who's been on Twitter is like Vibe Coding completely exploded on the list this time.

So, Lovable, sure. Wasn't even on the last list and now they're like number 23. Replet's also on there. It's just below the cutoff. Cursor is on there as well. Um, and it's interesting because like you would think that de the developer market is much smaller than the consumer market.

So for developerf facing products to make an app like this is pretty impressive and it shows that like a a significant majority of developers are using them.

Well, I think the way that I look at that market is there's so many people in the world that have had an idea for an application without the engineering co-founder like the CTO.

And so that's just like decade decade plus now of like pent up demand for people that had an idea for an app and then all these companies whether it's lovable or replet or things like that have people on TikTok saying like you can make an app now or they're running ads that say like you can make an app right and so that's just like a flood of demand for people yeah non-developers becoming developers for the first time.

How are you thinking about Meta's strategy? I noticed Meta AI ranked 46th. That feels pretty low compared to the amount of effort Mark Zuckerberg is putting into that project, although it's early days. Um, also the Meta AI app, I went to go test it.

I realized I had it downloaded because I had bought a pair of Meta Raybands and they kind of, you know, iterated on that product to turn it into Meta AI. But, you know, LLMs are vended into Instagram and yet Instagram's not on here.

Uh, do you think that you'll see more companies that are in the AI bolt-on narrative era of their business kind of jump on here? Do you want to keep them separate? Is it What is your thinking about all of that? Yeah, Meta is really interesting. It's funny.

The the larger tech companies I think have really uh stepped up in the past year or so on the AI front. Like Google is probably the best example of this. Um, Gemini was number two on the list. They also had the AI studio on the list. Notebook LM on the list. Google Labs which is where you get VO. Oh wow.

They have four four companies on four four separate entities on the list which were all ranked separately with their own traffic. Grock had a big debut on the list from from X formerly Twitter. Um Meta I think has struggled a little bit both on web and then on mobile.

I don't know if you guys remember the big scandal where they realized that a bunch of the users were accidentally posting their very private post to the public feed. Yes. And so usage fell off a little bit. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah.

So they didn't even make the mobile list, but to me it's like if you guys have tried the Meta AI products, they're a little bit underwhelming. Like quality of the images generated, the they did the weird celebrity companion thing.

So now that they're working with MidJourney, I would expect to see them make some improvements here, but it might take a little while. Yeah, even the MidJourney thing, it just feels so natural in the other apps.

And if you have a billion people opening one app every day, like where Meta has been successful has been put stories into Instagram. Put videos into Instagram.

They used to launch sidec car apps like Facebook had an app called Facebook Camera that was supposed to compete with Instagram and then they were like we got to shell out for Do you think Mid Journey's ranking gets hurt because people still use it in Discord or is or is they shift because it feels low at 28? Sure. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, they just recently kind of rolled out the web. Um, I think that's true for both MidJourney and Sunno and a couple other of the creative tool apps that also have Discords.

It's funny because in the first iteration of this list, like no one had a website, everyone had a Discord and now a lot of those companies are really trying to shift their traffic over. That's interesting.

Yeah, I bet you could do a different list of just like the top Discords because all that's very quantitative and available and um even relying relies on even uh further data. Um, Jordy, do you have anything else you want to take through this? Um, I'm wondering I can continue. Go for it.

Um, I I I'm just interested in uh understanding uh your predictions for what the next version might look like.

What are you tracking on the earlier stage side that isn't quite ready for breakout adoption in ter as measured by unique monthly visits, but we might see an uptick of in the next year or two on the consumer AI top 100? Yeah, I'm definitely expecting to see more in proumer and productivity.

We're I feel like both the models are just now reliable enough to actually do work for you or getting there and they're also agentic enough to like Perplexity Comic can draft an email and put it in your Gmail drafts folder which is amazing. Yeah.

Um, so we saw a couple companies like Manis make the list this time around that thesis, but I'd expect to see things like Fixer, Serif, and others in that category. Gen Spark is another big one that I would not be surprised to see on the next list.

The other what's been happening to all the companies that actually were GPT rappers where they were for a while you could build a business to a few million of ARR probably more just basically.

I remember one just advertising against chat uh talk to PDF and yeah there's those but I'm saying there was other ones that would be called like open chat and it would be oh sure yeah yeah when you would search chatgbt and they would have inapp subscriptions literal rappers GBT that was a loophole that was open on mobile so we we've only done the mobile list I think four times now and it was complete chaos the first three times because the app store was not policing what we call police there which was like all of developers mostly abroad that were just kind of ripping off the free version of chat GBT putting it in an app and acting like it was the same thing you got if you paid for chatbt premium y uh and they were called things like chat and askai or chat GBT or chat GB GTP or something but they finally cracked down on that over the last six months so now we have a mobile list that's like maybe more representative of true products but it's all like beauty cam filters now and scar do your homework and get answers.

Oh, really? What's your read on uh how Apple's done from a curation standpoint? There's like a lawsuit happening right now between XAI and OpenAI and Apple. I mean, this is probably going to get printed out and blown up on a big chart in court soon because Grock looks great here.

Um, but yeah, I mean, I I I'd love to know your thoughts on on on how Apple's curating uh the the app store. Apple is a little bit struggling overall with AI.

Like we've even seen this with Siri and the fact that they're now potentially going to turn to Gemini and Google Google to fix it for them, which would be kind of unheard of. Um I think they do an okay, but not a fantastic job with with curation.

It's definitely not like a payto-play situation from what I've seen or what I've heard. But I also don't think that they're necessarily kind of at the cutting edge of of what's truly the best products that are coming out next that people should be spending time on. Yeah. They also they should hire you.

Yeah, they should.

Uh they yeah I mean they also obviously uh prioritize they editorialize in what they recommend and so I would be surprised if they're pushing companionship anytime soon since the lineage going back to Steve Jobs was this is a very clean productivity creativity well I would imagine gets promoted midjourney I would imagine gets Apple coms is going to be every every day there's an article in the New York Times about how somebody had some something tragic happen to them while getting advice from a model and so Apple coms doesn't want to be like we recommended you recommended companions and the companions went haywire just very Anyway, we got to hop on with our next guest.

Thank you so much for joining. Thanks for having us. This is so fun. Thank you for list maxing. Thank you for list maxing. It doesn't get set. Thank you for reading it. I'm Let's hit the gong for the big list. We hear we hear the gong is is too loud. Too loud microphone.

Sorry for your ears, everyone, but great great to catch up. Thanks for hopping on. We'll talk to you soon. Talk soon. Bye. Up next, we have Flo from lindy. ai. Uh, big announcement today. We will bring him in from the reream waiting