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Where does consumer AI stand at the end of 2025?

As 2025 comes to a close, consumer AI is entering a new phase. A small number of products now dominate everyday use, multimodal models have unlocked entirely new creative workflows, and the big labs have pushed aggressively into consumer…

Olivia MoorehostBryan KimhostAnish AcharyahostJustine Moorehost
Dec 28, 202543mWatch on YouTube ↗

Summaries, chapters, transcripts, and FAQs on this page are made by uListen, not YouTube.

At a glance

WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT

Consumer AI in 2025: ChatGPT leads, multimodal virality reshapes competition

  1. ChatGPT remained the clear consumer leader in 2025 (roughly 800–900M WAU) with strong brand “Kleenex” effects, while Gemini accelerated recently driven by viral multimodal model launches like NanoBanana.
  2. The biggest consumer growth catalysts shifted from text chat to image/video breakthroughs—especially realism, controllability, and multimodal reasoning—plus surprising enablers like search integration and audio-in-video.
  3. Product execution and onboarding nuances (templates, trending prompts, frictionless first success) increasingly determine whether users try and stick with new capabilities, even when model quality is high.
  4. Several “new primitives” (connectors, proactive assistants like Pulse, browser agents like Comet) look strategically important but still feel unreliable or mis-executed, creating room for startups to win with opinionated UX.
  5. For 2026, the group expects more “anything-in/anything-out” multimodality, enterprise-to-consumer spillover via workplace adoption, rising app-generation efforts, and continued opportunity for startups—especially outside pure text-in/text-out assistants.

IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING

5 ideas

ChatGPT’s lead is reinforced by brand and habit, not just model quality.

The panel cites low multi-homing (only ~9% pay for more than one assistant) and that <10% of ChatGPT users even visited other major providers for much of the year, suggesting inertia and “default assistant” behavior matter as much as features.

Gemini’s clearest wedge is best-in-class multimodal virality, not generic chat.

Viral launches like NanoBanana (and Veo for video) pull users into Google surfaces even if they don’t think of Gemini as their primary assistant, and Android distribution meaningfully boosts mobile scale versus iOS.

Modern image/video differentiation is shifting from aesthetics to realism + reasoning + accuracy.

Beyond “style,” users now expect correct physical details, multi-input coherence, and even factual accuracy (e.g., product or historical fidelity), which sometimes requires search integration rather than just better generation.

UX templates and guided starting points are becoming the growth lever.

They contrast Gemini’s blank-slate prompt box with ChatGPT’s trending/template-led flow that nudges users into a first successful generation, then keeps them creating via character consistency and iterative suggestions.

Some under-hyped features (connectors, proactive nudges) are strategically huge but need reliability.

Connectors to email/calendar/docs and proactive products like Pulse hint at an “everything/workspace” direction, yet inconsistent performance and unclear everyday value currently limit retention.

WORDS WORTH SAVING

5 quotes

For most of the year, less than 10% of ChatGPT users even visited another one of the big LLM providers like Gemini

— Olivia Moore

ChatGPT is like the Kleenex of AI.

— Bryan Kim

These are product nuances that I, I think makes people actually take the first step- to generate it.

— Bryan Kim

I think it's because it's not the core competency of these companies anymore- to build opinionated standalone consumer UI.

— Olivia Moore

I genuinely believe that 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 2026 will be a huge year for consumer builders.

— Justine Moore

Read the available transcript
Winner-take-most dynamics in LLM assistantsChatGPT vs Gemini: brand vs distributionViral image/video moments (Ghibli, NanoBanana, Veo, Sora)Multimodal realism, reasoning, and accuracySearch integration and audio as unlocksOnboarding, templates, and product sensibilityProsumer workflows: connectors, browser agents, repeatable tasksSocial features: group chat, Sora feed, status gameChallengers: Claude, Perplexity, Grok, MetaCompute constraints and inference tradeoffsApp generation and apps directoriesStartup advantage: opinionated UI + multi-model

SPEAKERS

  • Olivia Moore

    host

    a16z investor focused on consumer AI products and emerging consumer software.

  • Bryan Kim

    host

    a16z consumer investor with a background in social/consumer products (previously at Snap).

  • Anish Acharya

    host

    a16z general partner focused on consumer software and AI-enabled applications.

  • Justine Moore

    host

    a16z consumer investor focused on AI-first consumer apps and creative tools.

High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.

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