this week, the market broke out After OpenAI disappointing revenue numbers This was revealed in the Wall Street Journal. The company is hurtling toward an (inevitable) $1 trillion-plus IPO, and any flaw in its story will cause a small panic. But once the dust settled, the larger underlying story baked into the numbers received little attention. That means consumer AI may have reached a plateau.
The current moment in generative AI began with the consumer application of ChatGPT, but the technology is still struggling to find its true self in consumer applications, and even ChatGPT’s breakneck growth appears to be fading. According to the magazine’s report, OpenAI missed its goal of 1 billion ChatGPT active users by the end of 2025 and may still be short of that number (reported weekly active users of 900 million). February of this year). Among chatbots overall, daily active user growth has leveled off, according to third-party analytics companies such as . apptopia.
“Including April, DAUs have declined in four out of the last five months,” Adam Blacker, director of communications at Apptopia, told me.
While generative AI apps for enterprises are rapidly gaining popularity, legal field, medicine, software developmentelsewhere, a corresponding consumer breakout has not materialized. The widespread use of ChatGPT is certainly an exception, but otherwise the technology hasn’t translated into the series of consumer hits that many initially expected. For example, there are no mainstream generative AI companions, fitness apps, life coaches, or fantasy adventure games.
The uneven progress of consumer AI compared to the boom in enterprise AI stands in sharp contrast in this week’s earnings calls from major technology companies. If your company owns the infrastructure to support enterprise AI, you’re sitting just fine. Amazon Reported 28% growth Amazon Web Services segment revenue increased significantly from 17% to 18% in recent quarters. “The last time we saw growth at this clip, AWS was about half the size,” said Amazon CEO Andy Jassy. On the other hand, Google Cloud Platform 63% increase Microsoft Azure grew 40%.
The consumer side of tech companies’ profits is a different story. Meta has told investors it will spend even more money than expected (a record amount) in the pursuit of “individual superintelligence.” 145 billion dollars this year) and the market punished it, pulling it down by 8.5% on Thursday. Apple, notorious for its AI “failures,” felt no pain after consumer products like the iPhone and MacBook Neo delivered impressive results. For now, it seems wise for Apple to refrain from investing heavily in training the underlying models in order to build less-desired consumer applications.
Until now, consumer AI has grown rapidly primarily due to novelty. ChatGPT’s Studio Ghibli moment generated a lot of interest and attracted many new users to the power of generated images, but that excitement eventually fizzled. OpenAI’s enhanced voice mode for ChatGPT has also caused a spike in user numbers, but the company still has work to do to realize the feature’s potential.
This does not mean that the age of AI is losing momentum. Adoption of new agent apps such as Codex and Claude Code is rapidly increasing. Anthropic is on track Over $30 billion This year we were successful because of Claude’s coding ability. And OpenAI’s latest GPT-5.5 model Codex revenue doubled within a week. Perhaps these “super apps” will capture the attention of the masses and become as standard as phones and laptops. But for now, the consumer slowdown is interesting.
I’ll be attending the ServiceNow Knowledge Conference next week to hear real stories from the people who are building ServiceNow. A new conversation will be dropped to me YouTube page It starts mid-week.
An AI coding agent deleted the company’s entire production code [Tom’s Hardware]
OpenAI CFO says demand for his product is ‘vertical’ [Bloomberg]
Microsoft releases OpenAI from cloud exclusivity agreement [WSJ]
Thanks to AI, memory chips are making incredible profits [WSJ]
Elon Musk says investing in OpenAI was foolish [New York Times]
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