The Ledger, every show

“11 Labs is a great example because I think you would imagine that OpenAI and others would have Built their own best in class audio models, but they just had such a compelling head start to the point that, like, the models are amazing. I will talk to founders w…”

“Maybe you're not ordering an Uber through ChatGPT, but any other product you can authenticate through, and it can borrow your tokens, it can borrow your memory, it can borrow everything that it knows about you from ChatGPT. I think that is probably more of whe…”

“In two, three, five years, Onboarding to software should not be a thing. Like, you should be able to log in with a ChatGPT or a Claude, and that new software product should know everything about you and, like, set up perfectly to cater to you”

“Well, so I personally don't think it's ever going to crack the mainstream consumer in a horizontal way.”

“And so I think we're actually not going to necessarily see a horizontal open claw for consumer, but we're going to see an open claw style architecture built into more focused consumer products.”

“16% are using it for just, like, casual conversation. Like, not the intense companion products, but, like, just having someone to talk to. And then, 12% are using it for, like, emotional support and advice. I think all of these use cases will, like, asymptote …”

“I think that this is what's gonna happen with agents, where ultimately, like, every tech company was a dot com company. Like, I think ultimately every AI company and then every tech company is going to be an agenda company, because that's just where the models…”

“Whether that's voice dictation, whether that's like a voice pin that answers questions or does tasks for you, I think that is going to spread to the mainstream consumer in the next six to nine months.”

“Whether it's their own memory or, like, ChatGPT lending memory, any product that you start to use two years from now, if it doesn't immediately feel like it knows you, it will feel broken. Like, the concept of, like, onboarding to a product should not be somet…”

“If we had to call it now, ChatGPT is currently in the lead, by far, at 800 to nine hundred million weekly active users.”

“If you look at the data, like the spike at launch and the sustained traffic for Comet was actually much higher than for ChatGBT's own browser launch, Atlas, which is kind of crazy given how much more distribution ChatGBT has than Perplexity.”

“Which is why we're also seeing, like, consumer products for the first time ever have more than a hundred percent revenue retention.”

“But it turns out this is an area where voice AI actually outperforms because humans are actually very good at violating compliance and regulations and voice AI can get it every time.”

“What we found was actually pretty surprising, which is that the median ARR, annualized revenue run rate, is now 4.2 million dollars at month 12 for consumer startups. The bottom quartile is 2.9 million. And the top quartile is 8.7 million.”

“And the even more surprising thing is those numbers are twice as high as the B to B benchmarks in the AI era.”

“But if you look at it on a paid user basis, so once you actually subscribe, consumer AI companies are retaining at the median pretty much just as well. As pre-AI consumer companies, which is really exciting.”

“Actual studies were showing depression and anxiety and kind of suicidal ideation were going down in users.”

“The models are less copyright sensitive in their training data.”

“They're growing, but maybe not the zero to twenty million monthly web visits that some of these uncensored companion apps can get.”

“And so we've seen actually a few startups I've talked to recently have started limiting their own virality, which sounds impossible because virality is theoretically organic. But what they'll do is if a video starts performing too well on TikTok, it gets too m…”

“I think it's going to change, and it's already changing.”

“What I would guess might happen here and what we're seeing play out a little bit in the data is that companies that are using AI grow so much faster that they end up needing to hire more humans to keep up with all the demand.”

“I do think there is still a lot of workflows and use cases where, like, the last one percent or the last two percent ends up being, like, a significant portion of the value, and I think for those, it's unlikely that the model companies will go all the way ther…”

“If you look at the gap between them and the number two Gemini on web, it's about still two and a half, three X. The gap between them and something like a Claude is closer to, like, 30 X. So even though a lot of these other apps are getting more attention, Chat…”

“So they still have Three million DAOs, and it's actually, you know, slightly climbing over time.”

“We haven't seen anyone crack AI social yet. I think it's going to be really tricky.”

“On web, they're 2.7 times bigger than Gemini. On mobile, they're 2.5 times bigger than Gemini. And then, despite, again, like, the kind of tech Twitter discourse Claude, they're almost 30 times bigger than Claude on web, and almost 80 times bigger than Claude …”

“So Singapore is number one. Then Hong Kong, then the UAE, then South Korea. The US is down at number 20, so not super low, not incredibly high. Russia and China are, like, very far down the list, like, sub 50.”

“There was actually a big survey last year from Edelman the global media company. And the US had a fairly low rate of trust in AI. It was like, 32%.”

“Like in the US, it's around probably a third of people are, Monthly active users of something like a ChatGPT.”

“The way video is shaping out, there's, it's unlikely to be like one model to rule them all, and so you kind of need to be able to switch between them.”

“The ramp that they reported from like zero to a 100,000,200 million ARR in the span of like, honestly, six, nine months is, is really kind of best in class.”

“If you look at kind of the highest spike for Comet and Atlas in terms of visits to the download page, Comet is five times ahead of Atlas”

“But I think it does unlock a lot of these other consumer use cases of AI, like finance, healthcare travel planning, complex shopping even, where pre-agents, there was just so much data you had to go out and grab. And do it reliably and do it across systems tha…”

“For most of the year, less than 10% of ChatGPT users even visited another one of the big LLM providers.”

“So only nine percent of consumers are paying for more than one out of the group of ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Cursor.”

“With the launch of new viral models like Nano Banana, Gemini is now growing desktop users a 155% year over year, which is actually accelerating even as they reach more scale, which is pretty crazy to see.”

“And ChatGPT is only growing 23% year over year.”

“It's kind of like the VO three moment when I don't think it was intuitive to people that video would be cracked necessarily by bringing audio together with video in the same place. And that ended up being the thing that made AI video go viral.”

“Like, if you look at Android, Gemini is at, like, 50% of ChatGPT's scale on mobile, whereas on iOS it's, like, 17%.”

“Actually, in some cases, I've heard of voice agent companies slowing down their agent or introducing background noise to make it sound more like a human.”

“Gemini was number two. It was right behind ChatGPT. It has just about 10% of ChatGPT's traffic on web, but it's much closer on mobile. It's like half of ChatGPT's traffic on the mobile app, which is interesting. It's mostly Android users, which I think you wou…”

“Manus is a great example. They just announced a ninety million annualized run rate. And if you look at their traffic, it's number one Brazil, number two US, and number three China.”

“And we put some of this in the report, but what we found for many of the leading vibe coding platforms, Is they actually see a hundred percent or above, ah, revenue retention in the first three months, and then maybe flatten out, ah, a bit below, ah, a hundred…”

“I mean, if you've been on TikTok or Reels or YouTube Shorts recently, in the past week, probably 90% of your feed is AI generated video.”

“The interesting thing about VO three is there's no IP restrictions, at least on cartoon characters. Yeah, on real people, there are. On cartoon characters, there are not.”

“So we also ran some extra some additional data analysis that shows that On average, consumer AI startups are charging 22 dollars a month across the average user, which again is like more than double what they were able to charge pre-AI for subscription compani…”

“And now we have people very happily paying 200 dollars a month and even saying in some cases that they feel like they're being undercharged for that, or they would pay more.”