The a16z Show Where Does Consumer AI Stand at the End of 2025?
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Dec 29, 2025 
In this insightful discussion, Justine Moore, a consumer investor focused on AI product design, emphasizes the contrasting approaches of Google and OpenAI in launching consumer products. Anish Acharya dives into advancements in image and video realism, highlighting remaining challenges in model reasoning. Bryan Kim discusses the nuances of product design that influence user engagement, particularly in how Gemini's onboarding could reshape adoption. The panel forecasts an exciting 2026 for consumer AI, emphasizing the potential for innovative startups and multimodal applications.
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Winner-Take-Most Dynamics
- Consumer LLM usage is trending toward winner-take-most with users favoring a single provider.
- Only about 9% of paying consumers subscribe to more than one major LLM, showing concentrated adoption.
Nano Banana's Viral Surge
- Gemini's Nano Banana drove rapid desktop growth and viral usage in late 2025.
- ChatGPT still grew but much more slowly comparatively, showing how viral multimodal models shift traffic.
Realism And Reasoning In Multimodal Models
- 2025 pushed multimodal models forward on realism and reasoning, not just aesthetics.
- Image and video improvements fixed small physics and consistency details that made outputs feel real.