AI has transformed the tech industry
In the months since the Court’s decision in the DOJ's search distribution case — which was filed back in 2020 — AI continues to transform the tech and search landscape in extraordinary ways, fueled by innovations from incumbents and upstarts. A large number have attained significant scale — all without any of the radical market interventions that the DoJ is proposing.
Amazingly, all of this has happened in less than 9 months:
- In January 2025, 60% of U.S. consumers used a generative AI-powered chatbot to conduct research or decide on a purchase (a16z), an increase of 50% from August 2024 (St. Louis Fed).
- Between August 2024 and early 2025, 17 new companies broke into the top 50 AI-first web products by usage (a16z). And venture (Reuters) and capital investments (CNBC) are soaring.
- OpenAI’s ChatGPT, one of the fastest-growing apps in history, surpassed 500 million weekly active users in early 2025, more than doubling from 200 million six months earlier. It received over 4 billion visits in March alone (Business Insider). And just recently, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said “10% of the world” uses ChatGPT — putting the number of users at approximately 800 million (Fortune).
- OpenAI launched a web search engine (ChatGPT Search) in October 2024 to paid subscribers, and expanded access to all ChatGPT users in February 2025 (Engadget).
- In December 2024, Apple Intelligence rolled out integrated access to OpenAI's ChatGPT on the iPhone (Apple).
- Meta reported that its Meta AI chatbot had 700 million monthly active users in the fourth quarter of 2024 (Investopedia). And as of October 2024, Meta was reportedly building a Llama-powered AI-based search engine for Meta AI, which is integrated across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp (The Information).
- In February 2025, Amazon announced Alexa+, which is powered by generative AI including Anthropic’s Claude AI model, and is available on 600 million Alexa-enabled devices (Reuters).
- Microsoft’s AI-powered Copilot is embedded across Microsoft’s products: Windows devices, its Edge browser, Bing, Microsoft 365, and Teams (CNET). Microsoft is also the major backer of OpenAI.
- xAI’s Grok-3 was announced in February 2025. Grok is deeply integrated into the X platform, which has 550 million monthly users (X). Daily active users of the Grok U.S. app increased by 260% since the launch of Grok 3 (TechCrunch).
- Anthropic’s Claude added web search capabilities in March 2025 (Fast Company), adding to a raft of new AI-first rivals in the space.
- Chinese AI company DeepSeek launched its V3 model in December 2024 and almost immediately garnered enough traffic to rank #2 among AI web apps. DeepSeek also includes a built-in web search feature that allows it to access and retrieve information from the internet (TechCrunch).
- Beyond DeepSeek, other Chinese companies have “have flooded the market with a rapid succession of low-cost AI services.” Baidu, Alibaba and others have released AI agents, chatbots and models; while Tencent, Ant Group, Meituan and others are also investing (Bloomberg). And the Chinese Government has set up a venture fund to invest in new AI businesses (CNN).
