AI

Ranked: The Most Popular AI Tools

Published

3 months ago

January 24, 2024

Niccolo Conte

This visual is part of our 2024 Global Forecast Series. For full access to the series, learn more here.

Ranked: The Most Popular AI Tools of 2023

Artificial intelligence had its breakout year in 2023, with large language models (LLMs) and text-to-image generators capturing the attention and imagination of technologists and investors alike.

Similar to other recent breakthrough technologies like the internet and the smartphone, the early stage of AI’s tech adoption cycle has already seen the creation of highly-used software products.

This visualization from our 2024 Global Forecast Series report uses data from Writerbuddy and Coatue to rank and visualize the most popular AI tools of 2023 along with key recent tech adoption cycles and the software products that defined them.

The Most Visited Artificial Intelligence Websites of 2023

Not surprisingly, ChatGPT, OpenAI’s product that sparked the artificial intelligence boom in late 2022, emerged as the most popular AI tool of 2023.

ChatGPT dominated the industry’s web visits with more than 60% of visits from September 2022 to August 2023, racking up 14.6 billion visits to their website.

Following ChatGPT is another chatbot, Character.AI, which rather than being a singular LLM for general and productivity-related user queries is a collection of characters (also known as “dialog agents”) that users can freely converse with. These range from popular characters from TV shows and video games to dating coaches and interactive strategy and text-based games.

AI Tool	Total Web Visits (Sept 2022 to Aug 2023)	Share of Industry Total
ChatGPT	14.6B	60.2%
Character.AI	3.8B	15.8%
QuillBot	1.1B	4.7%
Midjourney	500.4M	2.1%
Hugging Face	316.6M	1.3%
Google Bard	241.6M	1.0%
NovelAI	238.7M	1.0%
CapCut	203.8M	0.8%
JanitorAI	192.4M	0.8%
CivitAI	177.2M	0.7%

Another writing tool, QuillBot, rounds out the top three most popular AI web products of 2023, with these top three collectively accounting for more than 80% of visits to AI product websites.

Besides LLMs, leading AI image generator Midjourney was the fourth-most popular AI tool in 2023 and is followed by Hugging Face, an open source community which features hundreds of unique AI models that include LLMs, image generators, and other freely accessible AI tools.

This visual is from our 2024 Global Forecast Series Report:

Get full access to the series, which compiles insights from 700+ expert predictions for what will happen in 2024, by becoming a VC+ member today.

Software Creation in Tech Adoption Cycles

Despite still being in the early stages of its adoption, artificial intelligence has already produced tools that have garnered billions of visits and thousands of paying users for premium versions of AI products.

The launch and propagation of software products is a key driver for the user adoption of breakthrough technologies. Apps like Uber and Airbnb helped define the utility of smartphones as a technology, similar to what early websites like Google, Amazon, and YouTube did for the internet.

While this first wave of AI tools is already beyond what the world could’ve imagined even just a couple of years ago, as the public adoption of AI continues we’ll only see more powerful and unique AI tools and products.

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Technology

Visualizing AI Patents by Country

See which countries have been granted the most AI patents each year, from 2012 to 2022.

Published

2 days ago

April 24, 2024

Marcus Lu

Visualizing AI Patents by Country

This was originally posted on our Voronoi app. Download the app for free on iOS or Android and discover incredible data-driven charts from a variety of trusted sources.

This infographic shows the number of AI-related patents granted each year from 2010 to 2022 (latest data available). These figures come from the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), accessed via Stanford University’s 2024 AI Index Report.

From this data, we can see that China first overtook the U.S. in 2013. Since then, the country has seen enormous growth in the number of AI patents granted each year.

Year	China	EU and UK	U.S.	RoW	Global Total
2010	307	137	984	571	1,999
2011	516	129	980	581	2,206
2012	926	112	950	660	2,648
2013	1,035	91	970	627	2,723
2014	1,278	97	1,078	667	3,120
2015	1,721	110	1,135	539	3,505
2016	1,621	128	1,298	714	3,761
2017	2,428	144	1,489	1,075	5,136
2018	4,741	155	1,674	1,574	8,144
2019	9,530	322	3,211	2,720	15,783
2020	13,071	406	5,441	4,455	23,373
2021	21,907	623	8,219	7,519	38,268
2022	35,315	1,173	12,077	13,699	62,264

In 2022, China was granted more patents than every other country combined.

While this suggests that the country is very active in researching the field of artificial intelligence, it doesn’t necessarily mean that China is the farthest in terms of capability.

Key Facts About AI Patents

According to CSET, AI patents relate to mathematical relationships and algorithms, which are considered abstract ideas under patent law. They can also have different meaning, depending on where they are filed.

In the U.S., AI patenting is concentrated amongst large companies including IBM, Microsoft, and Google. On the other hand, AI patenting in China is more distributed across government organizations, universities, and tech firms (e.g. Tencent).

In terms of focus area, China’s patents are typically related to computer vision, a field of AI that enables computers and systems to interpret visual data and inputs. Meanwhile America’s efforts are more evenly distributed across research fields.

Learn More About AI From Visual Capitalist

If you want to see more data visualizations on artificial intelligence, check out this graphic that shows which job departments will be impacted by AI the most.