The Top 50 Generative AI Products: A Personal Challenge

New Here? Welcome to my weekly newsletter where I 'test drive' Generative AI products and share what's on my mind as I learn, analyze and make sense of Generative AI. If you're looking to start with the intro stuff, Check out? E13: Demystifying AI: What you need to know about the technology that's everywhere.

Lately I've been diving real deep on Midjourney (sorry I'm not sorry! its just THAT cool!), but it's time to zoom back out again to what's happening in the world of GenAI.

Recently I was reading up on the A16z blog and came across this chart of the Top 50 GenAI products (ordered by monthly visits):

How many of these stand out to you or do you know about? Likely it's the first column, as it has the big names- like ChatGPT.

Core Categories of Consumer GenAI Products

a16z organizes these products into a few core categories, and shares the market share of each:

1. General Assistants/ChatBots (68%): Consider the "do it all" go-to's that aren't focused on a single use case/goal. ex: ChatGPT, Poe, Bard
2. Companions (13%): Persona based chatbot experiences. Think a chatbot based on your favorite author, or for a specific use case- like a tutor. ex: Character.Ai
3. Content Generation (9.7%): A Focused application that creates content- like images, prosumer writing tools and creating videos. ex: Midjourney, Photoroom
4. Model Hubs (2.3%): Communities that offer models to download and run locally. Think of it like a GitHub for AI. ex: Hugging Face, Civitai (for images)

Monthly Growth: The Growth of Companion Products

Ok so now that we've seen the categorical breakdown, let's look at the Monthly growth and changes for these types of GenAI products outside of the more generalized assistants (like ChatGPT) -- you can see the Companion apps with the strongest growth line, and content generation up there as well.

Outside of these examples, Meta recently announced the development of Character "AIs" - mostly cultural icons and influencers - specifically in the messenger apps [the Verge, NYT, Meta]. What's really interesting about this is that the characters are based off celebrities, but aren't named with their names.

According to Wired, Character.AI says its active users spend more than two hours a day on the site, and r/CharacterAI, where people post screenshots of their chats, has more than 600,000 members, putting it in the top 1 percent of all subreddits. (we'll talk more about Character.Ai in a future post.. because it's deserving of it's own space)

What's Next: Working Through this List

From this list, there are a number of products that I personally haven't played with yet- so, starting with the next edition, I will start to feature one (or two) products and walk through how it works, what my thoughts are, and how you might find use from it.

Anything specific stand out to you that you'd like to learn about as I work through the list? Comment on this post and i'll prioritize it!

I'll be back soon with another test drive.

Until then, keep prompting, my friends (+ consider sharing and subscribing!)