😸 Which of these top 100 genAI apps do you use?

PLUS: NVIDIA crushes again, laser generates AI images

Welcome, humans.

Well, NVIDIA just dropped another monster earnings report yesterday, posting $46.7B in revenue and guiding to $54B next quarter. Huzzah, the entire US economy is saved! lol….

(Lets hope this ages well… we schedule these emails ahead of time, so don’t hold us accountable if the market opens in the red after you read this!).

Anyway, the numbers are honestly getting ridiculous at this point. Their data center business alone grew 56% year-over-year, and CEO Jensen Huang casually mentioned they're looking at a $3-4 trillion AI infrastructure buildout by 2030. Meanwhile, everyone's still scrambling to get their hands on H100s and the new Blackwell chips.

At this point, Jensen Huang could probably buy a small country with his GPU money. Actually, fun fact: NVIDIA is basically the world's 4th largest economy at this point.

Here’s what happened in AI today:

a16z ranked top 100 AI apps with Google placing four products.
UCLA created laser-based AI image generator using light for diffusion.
Google, OpenAI, and Perplexity expand in Asia for diverse training data.
Researchers mapped 9 bottlenecks blocking AI code automation.

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The AI App Ecosystem is Finally Growing Up

The Top 100 Most Used AI Apps in 2025

So a16z released their latest ranking of the top 100 consumer AI Apps across mobile and desktop, and the results are pretty fascinating. This data is based on SimilarWeb website traffic ranking, so it’s based on what actual consumers are actually using. Let’s dive in.

First, the big takeaway: the Wild West days are over. Only 11 new apps crashed the web party this time (compared to 17 last time), suggesting the ecosystem is stabilizing. Meanwhile, mobile saw 14 newcomers after app stores finally cracked down on those lazy “ChatGPT copycats.” Good riddance!

Google's making serious moves: For the first time, they've got FOUR products on the list. Gemini snagged the #2 spot behind ChatGPT with about 12% of ChatGPT's web traffic. On mobile it's much closer, with nearly half of ChatGPT's traffic. Not too shabby for the search giant that everyone thought was sleeping on AI! Their other babies made the cut too:

AI Studio hit the top 10 (#10 to be exact).
NotebookLM landed at #13 (remember when that went viral?).
Google Labs rolled in at #39 (it spiked 15% the month Veo3 dropped).

Grok 4 came out of NOWHERE, too. It went from no mobile app at the end of 2024 to #4 on web and #23 on mobile with 20m+ monthly active users. In fact, the July launch of Grok 4 drove a 40% usage spike, followed by that spicy anime avatar feature. Believe it or not, that drove serious growth. Why do you think Elon keeps tweeting about it?

The vibe coding explosion is REAL: Lovable jumped from the “almost made it” list to #22, and hit $100M ARR already. These platforms are seeing 100%+ revenue retention in the first 3 months. That's unheard of for consumer products. But here's the weird part—traffic to vibe coding platforms is way higher than traffic to the apps people build with them.

Either everyone's buying custom domains (doubt it), nobody’s shipping anything, or we're witnessing the birth of “personal software” (a.k.a tools you build and use just for yourself).

The AI agent tool Manus also made the cut for the first time, ranking #27 on the web list with its #1 traffic source coming from Brazil followed by the US. Manus also just announced it hit a $90M annualized run rate.

Check the report for the full list of all 100 tools, watch for the next edition to see if Google keeps its momentum, and whether any Western video models can finally compete with China's dominance. Spoiler: Veo 3 might be the first real contender.

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Prompt Tip of the Day.

Here’s how to get the most out of nano-banana from Greg Isenberg and Logan Kilpatrick (head of AI Studio) himself:

One edit per prompt: Don't stack instructions, the model gets confused
Be contractor-specific: Give clear, detailed directions like you're hiring someone.
Iterate without fear: Quality doesn't degrade, so start simple and refine.
Talk naturally: “Remove the logo” and “add text here” work perfectly.
Experiment freely: ~4 cents per image means you can test wild ideas.

P.S: Logan says it has serious world knowledge, so it intelligently places products in realistic scenes without micromanaging

Check out all of our prompt tips of the day from August here!

Treats to Try.

*Asterisk = from our partners. Advertise in The Neuron here.

*Grammarly fixes your writing mistakes and suggests better words for emails, proposals, and Slack messages—free to try, then $12/month.
Prime Intellect helps you find cheap GPUs and join collaborative AI model training, and just launched Environments Hub which lets you crowdsource AI training environments (coding tasks, games, dialogue) to build open-source models instead of letting big labs control all the data.
Fyxer sorts your emails into action categories, drafts replies in your tone, and takes meeting notes so you can get to inbox zero before 9am—free trial, then $22.50/month.
Google's Gemini CLI now works inside Zed's editor, so you can watch AI agents edit your code visually instead of running terminal commands.
Lindy Build codes entire web apps from prompts and fixes bugs by actually browsing and testing them, unlike other AI coders that work blind.
Hermes 4 is Nous Research's new open model that excels at creative tasks, shows you its actual reasoning process (using “hybrid reasoning” to compete with top closed models), and is “uncensored” to align with your values (download, paper)—try it here.
DeepLearning.AI offers online courses for AI education, and just launched “Agentic Knowledge Graph Construction” which teaches you to use AI agents to automatically build knowledge graphs from your data instead of doing it manually—free during beta so go take it right now!

Around the Horn.

Google added Duolingo-style language practice plus live translation across 70+ languages to its translate app, and Google Vids now turns photos into 8-second video clips, creates AI avatars to read your scripts, auto-removes “ums” from audio, and makes basic editing free.
UCLA researchers developed a new light-based AI image generator that can do diffusion (the process for generating images) via a laser beam (paper).
Google, OpenAI, and Perplexity are apparently using partnerships, new cheaper tiers, and free access to their tools in countries across Asia to gain new, diverse data sets to better train their models on user behavior.
Researchers from Cornell, MIT, Stanford, and UC Berkeley mapped out 9 fundamental bottlenecks blocking true AI code automation (paper).
Want to see Spot, the robot dog from Boston Dynamics, do a triple backflip?

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