Andreessen Horowitz: DeepSeek rockets to second place in the global generative AI consumer application rankings by 2025

In just a few months, the global consumer AI landscape has been rewritten: some products have developed rapidly, others have stagnated, and some unexpected players have rewritten the industry landscape overnight.

Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), a world-renowned investment fund and consulting firm, released a ranking of the world's top 100 generative AI consumer applications in 2025. DeepSeek, Doubao, Dark Side of the Moon, Conch Video, Kuaishou Keling and other Chinese AI applications all shine on the list.

The popularity of AI models in China is growing rapidly

This consumer AI ranking by a16z lists the world's top 50 most popular web-based generative AI applications (based on monthly unique visits from Similarweb) and the top 50 mobile-based generative AI (based on monthly active users from Sensor Tower).

The most dazzling one in this list is undoubtedly the "dark horse" of China's generative AI model - Deepseek. In just two months, DeepSeek has jumped from obscurity to become a strong challenger to ChatGPT, ranking second among web-based AI applications.

It is worth mentioning that other well-known Chinese models also grew rapidly and entered the ranking: ByteDance's Doubao ranked 10th; Dark Side of the Moon ranked 11th; Conch Video ranked 12th; Kuaishou Keling ranked 20th, all surpassing Sora, Midjourney, Runway and other well-known products in the same field.

In the mobile rankings, Baidu AI Search ranked 4th; Quark AI ranked 6th; Doubao ranked 7th; DeepSeek ranked 14th; and Meitu ranked 17th.

DeepSeek's user growth is amazing

DeepSeek is undoubtedly the more eye-catching focus of this list. Although DeepSeek's AI chatbot was only launched on January 20, it accumulated enough traffic in just 10 days to rank second in the world among all artificial intelligence products that month.

According to data from January 2025, 21% of DeepSeek users are from China, 9% are from the United States, and 8% are from India.

DeepSeek’s user growth performance since its launch has significantly outperformed most other general-purpose LLMs. The company reported reaching the 1 million user milestone in 14 days — although this was slower than ChatGP’s record of 1 million in 5 days, DeepSeek surpassed 10 million users in just 20 days, surpassing ChatGPT’s 40-day milestone.

On the mobile side, DeepSeek launched its mobile version on January 25, and it took only five days to reach the 14th place in the monthly active user rankings. In February, DeepSeek's monthly active user rankings on the mobile side once jumped to the 2nd place. However, due to policy reasons, DeepSeek was subsequently banned in the United States, India, Australia and other countries, and the number of users began to decline.

In terms of user engagement, according to Sensor Tower's monitoring data, based on the average number of sessions and usage time per user per week, DeepSeek users' engagement on mobile devices is slightly higher than Perplexity and Claude, but still inferior to ChatGPT.

DeepSeek's amazing performance has obviously attracted widespread attention. According to Google Trends data, on January 27, DeepSeek's global search popularity was comparable to ChatGPT, and even surpassed the latter in the United States!

Hai Luo and Ke Ling came from behind in the Vincent video market

Over the past 6 months, the AI ​​Wensheng video model has finally made significant progress in quality and controllability, and has achieved rapid growth in users.

Three Wensheng video applications - Conch AI (No. 12), Keling AI (No. 17) and OpenAI's Sora (No. 23) appeared together in the web version of the AI ​​application rankings.

Conch AI (MiniMax) and Keling AI (Kuaishou), both from China, have surpassed Sora, which made a splash in February last year, in terms of user growth. Keling AI was launched in June 2024, followed by Conch AI in September 2024. As of January 2025, both companies have surpassed Sora in monthly visits.

In the AI ​​video track, more changes are expected in the coming months. For example, models such as Google's Veo 2 (not yet publicly released) may bring more industry competition and improve industry standards. However, with a price of $0.5 per second, Veo 2 may be more inclined towards commercial use rather than mass consumers.

ChatGPT maintains top spot with feature updates

Of course, in this list, ChatGPT still occupies the throne of the world's most popular AI application. It is worth noting that in the past six months, ChatGPT has ushered in a second wave of rapid growth.

After its initial launch in November 2022, ChatGPT became the fastest-growing consumer app of all time, reaching 100 million users in just two months. However, its user growth soon plateaued, with global monthly visits remaining almost flat between March 2023 and April 2024.

ChatGPT has recently seen a rapid recovery in growth, doubling its monthly active users from 200 million to 400 million in less than six months, from August 2024 to mid-February of this year, allowing it to maintain its top spot.

ChatGPT user growth trend

What drove this growth? a16z analysis said that ChatGPT's initial growth boom stemmed from the initial novelty factor: many consumers found it interesting and enthusiastically tried it, but due to the lack of compelling daily use cases at the time, it once stagnated in growth. However, after the release of GPT-4o in mid-2024, OpenAI continued to launch new features and models, bringing a new round of growth momentum to GPT.

From Cailianshe