Where does consumer AI stand at the end of 2025?

A16z’s consumer investment team — Olivia, Justine, and colleagues — delivers a data-driven year-end review of the consumer AI landscape in 2025, covering every major platform and the product dynamics driving adoption. The headline finding: ChatGPT remains dominant at 800-900 million weekly active users, but Gemini is closing the gap at an accelerating rate, growing desktop users 155% year-over-year versus ChatGPT’s 23%. Claude, Grok, and Perplexity each sit at roughly 8-10% of ChatGPT’s usage, with Anthropic increasingly seen as owning the hyper-technical user segment.

The team identifies viral image and video models as the breakout consumer category of 2025 — OpenAI’s GPT-4o image generation (the “Ghibli moment”), Sora 2, Google’s VO3, and Google’s Nano Banana are all cited as examples of multimodal launches that drove mass consumer awareness in ways that pure chat products had not. The discussion also examines why Sora’s TikTok-style social feed saw strong initial engagement but weaker retention, framing Sora’s real competition as creative tools like CapCut rather than social platforms.

A structural insight anchors the analysis: only 9% of consumers currently pay for more than one major LLM service, suggesting the market may follow winner-take-most dynamics similar to other platform markets. The episode closes with predictions for 2026, with the a16z team expecting it to be a breakout year for consumer builders working on top of now-mature foundation models.

📺 Source: a16z · Published December 29, 2025
🏷️ Format: Deep Dive