AI Model
AI Model Growth and Decline in 2025: Who Rose, Who Fell, and What’s Next
Artificial intelligence evolved from experimental curiosity to essential infrastructure in 2025, reshaping how companies work, developers build, and everyday people interact with machines. Yet beneath the hype lies a dynamic landscape defined by winners and laggards — models whose usage skyrocketed, others that struggled to gain traction, and emergent forces that may reshape the competitive map in 2026 and beyond. This article reviews the data that can be verified today, draws insights from adoption trends, and explains what it means for the broader ecosystem of AI tools and services.
Dominant Models of 2025: Leaders by Adoption and Growth
In practical terms, model popularity in 2025 was determined by a mix of user retention, broad integration into products and workflows, and sheer scale of deployment across consumers and enterprises. Several data sources point to the same core leaders, even if the metrics differ slightly.
At the top of the adoption charts in 2025 was OpenAI’s GPT‑4o family. According to cloud deployment metrics, GPT‑4o appeared in nearly half of organizations using AI in the cloud — a dominant 44.7% share — making it the most widely deployed single AI model during the year. Other versions like GPT‑3.5 Turbo and GPT‑4o mini also remained highly popular due to their balance of performance, cost, and reliability for scaling commercial applications. Specialized models such as text‑embedding‑ada‑002 also ranked high, reflecting the importance of embeddings for search, document retrieval, and semantic tasks in real products.
Outside of raw deployment shares, user engagement data showed that ChatGPT (powered by GPT‑4 and its successors) achieved astounding scale, reaching hundreds of millions of active users weekly and dominating traffic on generative AI platforms throughout 2025. One analytics estimate put ChatGPT’s reach at around 700 million weekly users during the latter half of the year, with strong retention and heavy daily engagement.
Beyond OpenAI’s ecosystem, Google’s Gemini showed one of the most notable growth trajectories among major competitors. Over the course of 2025, Gemini’s share of web traffic to AI platforms climbed steadily, with estimates suggesting an increase from single‑digit percentages early in the year to roughly one‑fifth of total AI traffic by year’s end. This reflects both product improvements and Google’s strategy of integrating this model across its vast consumer services and products.
Meanwhile, Anthropic’s Claude models continued to expand their footprint, especially with enterprise customers, even though their consumer usage remained behind the largest players. The launch of advanced variants — such as Claude Opus 4.5 — underscored this momentum, particularly in applications requiring deep reasoning, code generation, and multi‑step task workflows.
Standouts in Growth: Climbers and Emerging Forces
One of the more interesting dynamics of 2025 was the growth of models and platforms outside the traditional Western ecosystem. DeepSeek, a cost‑free and open‑source alternative, gained traction especially in regions with limited access to premium AI offerings. By eliminating subscription barriers, DeepSeek not only expanded user adoption in parts of Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe, but also highlighted affordability as a key driver of AI usage in many markets.
Microsoft Copilot, while not matching the scale of ChatGPT or Gemini, grew rapidly from a near‑zero base in early 2025 to registering a meaningful presence later in the year. Its deep integration into widely used office productivity tools helped spur adoption among business users and developers alike.
Social platform integrations also boosted some smaller models’ growth metrics. For example, Grok (X AI) experienced significant uptake as part of the wider social network ecosystem, gaining millions of daily active users and leveraging unique integration points in the X platform.
Models That Stagnated or Lost Ground
Despite the overall growth of AI adoption worldwide, not all models maintained momentum. Some of the most telling data — particularly from web traffic and usage analytics — indicates that once‑promising alternatives struggled to sustain relevance compared to category leaders.
Perplexity, a research‑oriented AI assistant that once held a high market share in early 2025, saw its share of usage decline through the year. Though it carved out a niche among users seeking live‑data integration and specialized responses, it could not match the broader appeal or ecosystem support enjoyed by larger platforms.
Other smaller consumer AI models and early startup offerings saw modest or flat user growth in 2025, reflecting both consolidation around dominant players and the challenges of breaking through entrenched incumbents. Some models focused on narrow technical domains — such as purely coding assistants — maintained specialist audiences but did not grow in general adoption. Similar surveys show that overall sentiment toward AI tools among developers and professionals even softened slightly in 2025, possibly reflecting fatigue or higher expectations as the technology matured.
Enterprise vs. Consumer Landscapes: Different Stories
Usage trends differ substantially when viewed through enterprise versus consumer lenses.
For businesses, spending and deployment metrics clearly positioned OpenAI’s models as the leader in enterprise adoption, with some estimates suggesting well over one million business customers and a rising share of corporate AI budgets dedicated to GPT‑powered services.
Anthropic and Google also registered adoption gains in enterprise workflows, often driven by API integrations, compliance and safety positioning, and deep integrations with business applications. While these enterprise shares remain smaller than OpenAI’s, their growth signals meaningful diversification of foundational model usage.
Consumer usage, on the other hand, revealed more consolidation. A small number of models — primarily ChatGPT and Gemini — captured the vast majority of general usage traffic, with lower‑profile alternatives struggling to attract consistent long‑term engagement beyond initial trial bursts.
Geographic & Demographic Trends: Where Growth Happened
Beyond individual models, global AI adoption data from 2025 shows broader patterns that influenced which tools grew fastest:
The overall percentage of people worldwide using generative AI tools continued to climb, reaching levels where roughly one out of every six people now engages with AI for work, learning, or creative tasks.
Adoption rates diverged sharply between regions. Advanced economies with robust digital infrastructure — such as the United Arab Emirates, Singapore, and several European countries — saw rapid uptake, while the global south’s adoption lagged, highlighting structural gaps in access and infrastructure. Open or free models like DeepSeek helped mitigate some of these disparities, especially in developing markets.
In workplace contexts, AI tools became nearly ubiquitous among enterprises, with surveys indicating that a large majority of organizations were not only experimenting with AI but scaling it in core business functions such as customer service, research, and productivity workflows.
Why Some Models Grew Faster Than Others
Several key dynamics explain why some AI models surged ahead while others struggled:
- Integration and Ecosystem: Models integrated into widely adopted platforms — such as office suites, search engines, or social media — grew faster because their reach was embedded in daily user habits.
- Cost and Accessibility: Open‑source or free models saw adoption spikes where users could access advanced AI without subscription barriers, particularly in emerging markets.
- Specialization vs. General Utility: Models with broad multimodal capabilities — able to handle text, images, and even audio — captured larger audiences than those focused on narrow niches.
- Platform Support and Retention: Services that retained users through persistent engagement mechanisms or long‑term workflows (e.g., development and productivity tools) showed stickier adoption.
- Brand and Visibility: Established brands with strong market presence continued to dominate, especially where ecosystem lock‑in amplified usage data.
Outlook for 2026: Competition and Evolution
As we move through 2026, several outlooks become clear:
Competition Will Intensify: Leaders will face pressure from both established rivals and small, specialized models that excel in specific domains. Rapid iteration cycles and frequent releases of new versions suggest the competitive landscape will remain fluid.
Open Models Will Matter More: Continued demand for accessible AI, especially in developing economies, will likely push open‑source models into larger roles, particularly where affordability and customization trump polished commercial services.
Enterprise Adoption Will Deepen: Businesses of all sizes are shifting from piloting to scaling AI programs, meaning models that offer robust APIs, compliance guarantees, and integration with enterprise workflows will continue to grow.
Market Concentration vs. Diversity: While a few major models dominate the overall user base, the ecosystem is becoming richer beneath the surface, with specialized offerings for code generation, document processing, multimodal creativity, and conversational workflows.
Conclusion: A Dynamic 2025 Sets the Stage for 2026
The objective story of 2025 is one of both consolidation and expansion. A handful of models — led by GPT‑4o variants, ChatGPT, and Google’s Gemini — captured the lion’s share of usage and growth. Others, like Perplexity, plateaued or declined as users gravitated toward broader utility and stronger ecosystems.
Emerging forces and open‑source alternatives demonstrated that accessibility remains a critical factor in adoption, particularly across diverse global markets. Enterprise adoption ramped up meaningfully, with organizations starting to embed AI into core processes rather than just experimenting.
Looking ahead, the competitive landscape is far from static. New innovations, shifts in pricing strategy, regulatory developments, and evolving user expectations will shape which models rise, which fall, and how AI becomes woven into everyday life. What’s clear is that 2025 was not a plateau, but a pivotal transition toward deeper integration of AI into the world’s digital and economic fabric.