Consumer apps

Microsoft is an American technology company founded in 1975 and headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Its AI work combines a partnership with OpenAI, the Copilot products and its own in-house MAI and Phi models.

Sam Altman is the co-founder and CEO of OpenAI. He ran the startup Loopt, was president of Y Combinator from 2014 to 2019, and was removed as OpenAI’s CEO in 2023 before returning days later.

Amazon is the American technology company founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994. Through Amazon Web Services it became a major cloud provider, and it has built its own AI models, chips and assistants, including the Nova models and Trainium chips.

Sony's ERS-110, announced in May 1999, was the first AIBO: a four-legged autonomous entertainment robot that learned from interaction with its owner and expressed emotions.

Siri, Inc. was a startup spun out of SRI International in 2007 to turn decades of AI research — notably the CALO project — into a consumer virtual personal assistant; Apple acquired it in 2010.

ByteDance is a Chinese internet company founded in 2012, whose AI work includes the Doubao chatbot, the TRAE coding tool, the Seed model team and the Volcano Engine cloud platform.[^1]

Cruise was a San Francisco autonomous-vehicle company founded in 2013 and acquired by General Motors in 2016; it ran paid driverless rides in San Francisco before its permits were suspended and GM wound the business down.

Amazon Echo is an always-on, nine-inch cylindrical speaker that answers to the name Alexa. Launched in November 2014 by invitation, it put a voice assistant into an ordinary room rather than a phone.

OpenAI is a San Francisco AI research and deployment company founded in 2015 as a nonprofit. It makes the GPT model family and ChatGPT and filed confidentially for an IPO in June 2026.

Waymo's app-based ride-hailing service, in which the car drives itself. It was the first service to carry public passengers without a safety driver, and it is how Waymo brings autonomous driving to ordinary riders.

Tesla's most advanced driver-assistance package, sold as a $99 monthly subscription. It steers, changes lanes, follows routes and parks, while the driver stays responsible and the car is not autonomous.

ChatGPT is OpenAI's AI chatbot, released as a research preview on 30 November 2022. It grew to hundreds of millions of weekly users and added agents, voice, browsing and workplace tools.

Google's consumer AI assistant, announced as Bard in 2023 and renamed Gemini in 2024. It is where ordinary users meet Google's Gemini models, first as a chat box and later through voice, research agents and subscriptions.

Claude apps (claude.ai) are Anthropic's chat assistant for consumers and businesses. The public beta opened with Claude 2 in 2023, and the apps have since added paid plans, Projects, web search and Research.

Gemini 1.0 is the first generation of Google DeepMind's multimodal model family, announced on 6 December 2023 in Ultra, Pro and Nano sizes; Google reported its Ultra version as the first model to beat human experts on MMLU.

GPT-4o is a multimodal model from OpenAI, released in May 2024, that takes text, audio, image and video as input and generates text, audio and image output within one neural network. It was removed from ChatGPT in February 2026.

Claude 3.5 Sonnet, released on 20 June 2024, was the first model of the Claude 3.5 family. It ran twice as fast as Claude 3 Opus at the mid-tier price and powered the new Artifacts and Projects features.

GPT-5 is OpenAI's fifth GPT foundation model, released on 7 August 2025. It pairs a fast model with a deeper reasoning model and a router that chooses between them for each request.

Figure 03 is Figure's third-generation humanoid robot, announced in October 2025. It is designed around the company's Helix AI for home tasks and mass manufacturing, with a new camera system, tactile hands and wireless charging.

NEO is a humanoid robot announced by 1X on 28 October 2025 and marketed as the first consumer-ready humanoid: a 66-pound, softly built machine with 22 degrees of freedom per hand, priced at US$20,000 for Early Access or US$499 a month by subscription.

Apollo Go is Baidu's autonomous ride-hailing service. It reported more than 2.2 million fully driverless rides in the second quarter of 2025, had passed 14 million cumulative rides by August 2025, and is expanding through testing permits and partnerships with Uber and Lyft.

Manus is a general-purpose AI agent product, marketed as "Hands On AI", that runs research, slides, design, images, music and video, and shipped a new architecture, Manus 2.0, on 28 September 2026.

Robin Li (李彦宏) is a Chinese technologist and businessman who co-founded Baidu in 2000 and has been its chief executive since 2004. He is best known for the company's search business and its ERNIE AI models.

Elon Musk is an entrepreneur who led SpaceX and Tesla, co-founded PayPal's predecessors and OpenAI, and founded xAI, the company behind the Grok models.

Indian-born American executive who rose from leading Google Chrome and Android to become CEO of Google and then Alphabet, and who has overseen the company's push into AI, including Bard and Google DeepMind.

Apple is a US technology company founded in 1976 that makes the iPhone, iPad and Mac. It introduced Apple Intelligence in 2024, builds its own Apple Foundation Models, and in 2026 agreed to build its next models with Google.

Chinese technology entrepreneur who co-founded ByteDance in 2012 and led it as CEO until November 2021, when he handed the role to co-founder Liang Rubo and remained founder and chairman.

Mark Zuckerberg is the chairman and chief executive of Meta Platforms, the company formerly known as Facebook. He recruited the founding researchers of Facebook AI Research in 2013 and announced Meta Superintelligence Labs in 2025.

Mustafa Suleyman is a British AI entrepreneur who co-founded DeepMind and Inflection AI, and in 2024 became chief executive of Microsoft AI, leading its Copilot and in-house model work.

Albanian-American engineer who served as OpenAI's chief technology officer, briefly as its interim CEO in November 2023, and later founded and leads Thinking Machines Lab.

Dragon Dictate, released by Dragon Systems in 1990, was the first speech-recognition product sold to consumers; at $9,000 it was costly, but it started the line of products that led to continuous speech recognition.

PC Therapist was Joseph Weintraub's conversational program; a modified version won the first annual Loebner Prize Competition in 1991, fooling five of 10 judges into thinking it was human.

The Newton MessagePad was Apple's first handheld computer built on Newton technology, shipping on 2 August 1993 with a pen-based interface, handwriting recognition and a modular communications design.

Dragon NaturallySpeaking is speech recognition software from Dragon Systems, first released in 1997 as a continuous dictation product; it turns speech into text, runs spoken commands and reads documents aloud, and is still sold today under Microsoft.

Tencent is a Chinese internet company founded in 1998, known for QQ, WeChat and video games. Since 2023 its Hunyuan model line has been its main AI effort, later branded Hy.

Alibaba Group is a technology company founded in 1999 that describes itself as focused on AI + Cloud and commerce; its Qwen models and data centre build-out are central to that positioning.

Baidu is a Beijing-based Chinese internet company founded in 2000. It runs China's dominant search engine and develops the ERNIE model family and the ERNIE Bot chatbot.

An autonomous vacuum cleaning robot released by iRobot in 2002, Roomba created the consumer robot vacuum category and made its maker the market leader for years.

Wolfram|Alpha is a web service that answers questions by computing results rather than returning links. Built entirely in Mathematica, it went live in test mode on 15 May 2009 and was declared officially launched three days later.

Bing is Microsoft's consumer search brand, launched on 3 June 2009 and pitched as a "Decision Engine" meant to help people make faster, better-informed decisions in areas such as shopping, travel, health and local business.

Siri was a mobile app, on sale in Apple's App Store from February 2010, that turned spoken requests into answers using speech recognition, GPS and partner services. Apple bought the company behind it that April.

Kuaishou Technology is a Beijing-based short-video and live-streaming company, founded in 2011 as GIF Kuaishou. It listed in Hong Kong in 2021 and builds the Kling video generation model.

Coursera is an online learning platform launched in 2012 by Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, offering courses, Specializations, Professional Certificates, degrees and skills-focused learning with a mission of universal access to world-class learning.

Google Now is an Android feature, announced with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean in June 2012, that pushes weather, traffic, scores and other information to users as cards at the moment they need it, without a search query.

Zoox is an autonomous ride-hailing company founded in 2014 that builds its own zero-emissions robotaxis, with no steering wheel or pedals, and the software that drives them. It began carrying paying-concept service in Las Vegas after receiving the first commercial exemption for a purpose-built robotaxi.

1X Technologies is the robotics company, founded in 2014 as Halodi Robotics, that builds tendon-driven humanoid robots. In October 2025 it announced NEO, a home humanoid priced at $20,000 or by monthly subscription, with first deliveries planned for 2026.

Li Auto is a Chinese automaker that describes itself as a pioneer in commercialising extended-range electric vehicles in China. It sells extended-range and battery-electric family vehicles and has built a large delivery, retail and charging footprint.

A DeepMind generative model that predicts raw audio one sample at a time, bringing neural text-to-speech close to human quality and later powering Google Assistant and Cloud Text-to-Speech voices.

Apple's 2017 smartphone chip, announced with the iPhone X: a six-core CPU, an Apple-designed three-core GPU and a dual-core neural engine built for on-device machine learning such as Face ID.

LaMDA is a family of conversational language models that Google announced in 2021 and described in a 2022 paper, notable for its work on safety and factual grounding in dialogue and for later powering Bard.

A four-legged consumer robot launched by Unitree in June 2021, the Go1 cost about 16,000 yuan and ran at up to 4.7 metres per second — an early attempt to sell a legged robot to ordinary buyers.

MiniMax is a Shanghai-based AI company founded in December 2021 by computer-vision researchers from SenseTime. It builds text, speech and video models and consumer apps such as Talkie and Hailuo AI, and listed in Hong Kong in January 2026.

Manus is a Singapore-based AI startup, founded in Beijing as Butterfly Effect in 2022, that builds AI agents. Meta agreed to buy it for about $2 billion, the deal was blocked in China, and it later returned to independence.

Midjourney is a San Francisco-based independent research lab that runs an image generator. Founded and led by David Holz, it has never taken outside funding and has been involved in several copyright lawsuits.

DALL·E 2 is an image generator that OpenAI announced on 6 April 2022. It uses a diffusion decoder conditioned on CLIP image embeddings and supports image variations and language-guided editing. OpenAI deprecated its API in late 2025 and shut it down in May 2026.

Midjourney is an AI image generation service from Midjourney, Inc. Its open beta began on 12 July 2022 through a Discord bot, and it later added a website, video generation and new model versions.

Perplexity AI is a San Francisco company founded on 22 August 2022 by Aravind Srinivas and others. It runs an AI answer engine that cites web sources and has since added models, a browser and agents.

Perplexity is an AI answer engine launched on 7 December 2022. It answers questions in natural language and cites its web sources, and it later added Deep Research, finance and shopping features and agents.

An open bilingual chat model from Zhipu AI and Tsinghua KEG with about 6.2 billion parameters, small enough to run on one consumer GPU, with weights fully open for research.

Microsoft Copilot is the company's AI chatbot and assistant, which started in 2023 as Bing Chat and became a single consumer and business AI brand that now includes in-house models.

Chinese AI company founded in Beijing in 2023 by Tsinghua schoolfriends Yang Zhilin, Zhou Xinyu and Wu Yuxin; maker of the long-context Kimi assistant and the K-series models, and one of China's fastest-rising model developers by valuation.

GPT-3.5 Turbo was the chat-optimised GPT-3.5 model OpenAI released through its API on 1 March 2023, priced at a tenth of the cost of earlier models and later replaced in ChatGPT by GPT-4o mini.

xAI is an AI company founded by Elon Musk that builds the Grok models and chatbot. It was acquired by SpaceX in 2026 and has since been renamed SpaceXAI and then SpaceXSI.

Claude is the AI assistant Anthropic announced on 14 March 2023, its first publicly available assistant. It was built around training AI to be helpful, honest and harmless, and it started the Claude model line.

Midjourney V5 is a version of the Midjourney text-to-image model, released in alpha on 15 March 2023 and refined through the 5.x line before being succeeded by V6 in December 2023.

ERNIE Bot (文心一言) is Baidu's chatbot, first released to invited testers in March 2023 and opened to the public that August. It has been offered in free and paid tiers and renamed Wenxiaoyan in 2024.

The Qwen app is Alibaba's consumer chatbot built on its Qwen models. It began as a beta of Tongyi Qianwen in April 2023 and has since added app integrations and reached 234 million users by May 2026.

PaLM 2 is Google's second-generation Pathways language model, announced on 10 May 2023 in four sizes and used across more than 25 Google products, including Bard.

Unitree Go2 is a quadruped robot released in July 2023 at a starting price of 9,997 yuan, which Unitree said brought pricing in this category below 10,000 yuan for the first time.

Claude 2 is the second major version of Anthropic's assistant model, released on 11 July 2023 with better performance and longer responses. It was the first Claude model open to the general public.

A Google research and note-taking tool that answers only from the sources a user supplies and cites the passages it used. Launched in 2023 under the name Project Tailwind, it became widely known for turning documents into podcast-style Audio Overviews.

Doubao is ByteDance's AI chatbot, opened for invitation testing in August 2023 and later offering text, image and voice generation, AI search and video generation.[^1][^2]

DALL·E 3 is OpenAI's image generation model announced on 20 September 2023 and released inside ChatGPT that October. It turned a user's idea into a detailed prompt before drawing, and was later replaced by GPT Image.

Meta AI is Meta's conversational assistant, introduced in US beta in September 2023 on WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram. It was rebuilt on Llama 3 in 2024 and on Muse Spark in 2026.

Kimi is an AI chatbot from Moonshot AI, released in October 2023 and opened to the public the following month. It is known for very long context windows and has since added search, agent and coding features.

ERNIE 4.0 is Baidu's foundation model unveiled in October 2023, pitched as its most capable model and, in Robin Li's words, "not inferior in any aspect to GPT-4". It anchors Baidu's ERNIE Bot assistant and Qianfan platform.

Grok is the chatbot from xAI, first offered in November 2023 to a small waitlist of US users. It has grown into a family of apps and models covering search, images, video and coding agents.

Le Chat is Mistral AI's assistant, launched in beta on 26 February 2024. It gained web search, a Pro tier, Deep Research and other features over 2024 and 2025, and on 28 May 2026 it was merged into the Vibe agent.

Hailuo AI is MiniMax's generative AI product, launched in March 2024 for text and music generation and extended to video with the video-01 model. It drew copyright scrutiny when major studios sued MiniMax in September 2025.

Claude 3 Sonnet was the middle model of Anthropic's Claude 3 family, announced on 4 March 2024. It powered the free tier of claude.ai, offered a 200K-token context window, and was retired on 21 July 2025.

Microsoft AI is the consumer AI organisation Microsoft formed in March 2024 to advance Copilot and its other AI products and research, led by Mustafa Suleyman. It develops the MAI family of in-house models.

Phi-3 is Microsoft's family of small language models, launched in April 2024 with Phi-3-mini, a 3.8-billion-parameter model small enough to run on a phone.

AI Overviews are AI-written summaries placed at the top of Google Search results, launched across the US in May 2024 and later joined by AI Mode, a separate search experiment. They became one of the most widely used consumer applications of generative AI.

Tencent Yuanbao is an AI assistant app from Tencent, launched on 30 May 2024, that runs on its Hunyuan models and later integrated DeepSeek-R1, HY 2.0 and Hy3.

Kling AI is Kuaishou's AI video and image creation platform, built on its Kling models. It began testing in June 2024 and went global that July, and its annualised revenue run rate passed US$240 million by December 2025.

Apple Intelligence is Apple's personal-intelligence system, announced at WWDC on 10 June 2024 for iOS 18, iPadOS 18 and macOS Sequoia. It runs models on device and uses Private Cloud Compute for larger requests.

A small, low-cost language model OpenAI released on 18 July 2024, priced far below GPT-4o and reported at 82% on MMLU; it replaced GPT-3.5 Turbo in ChatGPT on launch day.

Bolt.new is a StackBlitz product, launched on 3 October 2024, that builds websites, apps and prototypes from a chat prompt. It bundles code generation with hosting and reported about a million dollars of annual recurring revenue in its first week.

Lovable turns a plain-language description into a full-stack web application, aimed at people who cannot code. Launched in November 2024, it grew quickly in users and raised several large funding rounds at rising valuations.

The DeepSeek app is the company's official free chatbot, offered on the web and as mobile apps since 15 January 2025. It topped the U.S. App Store in late January 2025.

Operator is an AI agent OpenAI released on 23 January 2025 that works in a web browser by looking at screenshots and using a mouse and keyboard. Its abilities were folded into ChatGPT agent in July 2025.

OpenAI's small reasoning model released on 31 January 2025, offered to all ChatGPT users including the free tier, with three reasoning-effort levels and developer features such as function calling and Structured Outputs; succeeded by o4-mini in April 2025.

Deep research is a research agent in ChatGPT, released by OpenAI on 2 February 2025 and built on a version of o3, that searches the web and turns many sources into a written report.

Alexa+ is Amazon's next-generation Alexa assistant, rebuilt on generative AI and introduced in February 2025. It costs $19.99 a month, is free for Prime members and can book services, order groceries and control smart-home devices.

GPT-4.5 is a large language model OpenAI released on 27 February 2025 under the code name "Orion". It was its largest chat model at the time, priced far above GPT-4o, and was retired from general availability within months.

OpenAI's native image generator built into GPT-4o, released in ChatGPT on 25 March 2025 and later offered in the API as gpt-image-1. It replaced DALL·E 3 and was noted for accurate text rendering and close prompt following.

A model in Google's Gemini 2.5 family, released in preview in April 2025 and generally available that June. Google called it its first fully hybrid reasoning model, letting developers turn thinking on or off with a token budget.

Tesla Robotaxi is Tesla's ride-hailing service, in which passengers hail autonomous vehicles through the company's app; its dedicated two-seat Cybercab has no steering wheel, pedals or mirrors. Limited service began in Austin in June 2025.

Unitree R1 is a small humanoid robot released by Unitree on 25 July 2025 at a starting price of 39,900 yuan, the company's third humanoid model and its lowest-priced one to date.

Li Auto's VLA Driver model is a vision-language-action driving model that began reaching customers with the Li i8 in August 2025 and was pushed to all AD Max users via OTA 8.0 in September 2025.

Nicknamed "nano-banana", Gemini 2.5 Flash Image is Google's image generation and editing model released on 26 August 2025, able to blend images, keep characters consistent across edits and apply targeted natural-language edits.

Sora 2 is OpenAI's second-generation video and audio generation model, unveiled on 30 September 2025 with a social iOS app. OpenAI discontinued Sora in 2026, and its API models were scheduled to shut down in September 2026.

GPT-5.1 is an update to GPT-5 released by OpenAI on 12 November 2025. It added a warmer default personality with selectable styles, and its API version has been scheduled for shutdown in 2027.

Gemini 3 Flash is a fast, lower-cost model in Google's Gemini 3 family, released on 17 December 2025. It scored close to Gemini 3 Pro on several benchmarks while using fewer tokens and costing far less per token.

Claude Cowork is an agent for non-coding knowledge work, such as research, analysis and document creation. It launched as a research preview in January 2026 and now runs on desktop, web and mobile.

Released on 17 February 2026 with a 1M-token context window in beta, Claude Sonnet 4.6 kept the price of Sonnet 4.5 and became the default model for Free and Pro users on claude.ai.

Muse Spark is the first model from Meta Superintelligence Labs, released on 8 April 2026 as a closed model that powers the Meta AI app and meta.ai. An open-weight sibling followed later.

Gemini 3.5 Flash is Google's first Gemini 3.5 model, announced on 19 May 2026 and built for agentic and coding work; it became the default model in the Gemini app and in AI Mode in Search.

Claude Sonnet 5, released on 30 June 2026, is Anthropic's most agentic Sonnet model. It can make plans, use browsers and terminals, and run autonomously, at an introductory price of $2 and $10 per million tokens.

Claude Sonnet 5.5, released on 28 September 2026, is the second model in the Claude 5.5 family and Anthropic's fastest Sonnet to date. It costs $2 and $10 per million tokens, with cache reads halved in October 2026.

LFM3-Omni-2B is Liquid AI's first omni-modal model in the LFM3 family: one 2.17-billion-parameter model that reads text, images, video and audio and answers in text or speech.

General Motors acquired the self-driving startup Cruise Automation in 2016, then stopped funding its robotaxi work in December 2024 and refocused on hands-free driver assistance such as Super Cruise.

ElevenLabs is an AI voice and media platform whose business spans voice generation, voice agents for customer experience and creative tools; it ended 2025 with $350 million in annual recurring revenue.

XNGP is XPENG's advanced driver assistance system, developed full stack in-house; its next generation, VLA 2.0, generates driving actions directly from visual signals and is slated for mass production in 2026.

Google, part of Alphabet, works on AI at several levels at once: it designs its own TPU chips, trains large language models such as PaLM and Gemini, and brought its research labs together as Google DeepMind in 2023.

Noam Shazeer is an AI researcher who co-wrote the Transformer paper and was first author of the paper on sparsely gated mixture-of-experts layers. He co-founded Character.AI, returned to Google in 2024, and announced a move to OpenAI in 2026.

Suno is an AI music generator that turns prompts into finished songs, and increasingly a browser-based production suite with a studio, voice recording and stem separation.

Lovable is a platform that turns a plain-language description into working software, handling hosting, backend and payments; its co-founder says annual run-rate revenue passed $600 million.

Verne is a Rimac Group company developing an electric two-seater robotaxi with no steering wheel or pedals; with Pony.ai and Uber it launched a commercial driverless service in Zagreb in 2026.

Joseph Tsai is co-founder and chairman of Alibaba Group. A lawyer by training, he has served on the company's board since its founding in 1999 and has previously held the roles of chief financial officer and head of strategic investments.

Pony Ma is a co-founder of Tencent and serves as its chairman of the board and chief executive officer. He studied computer science at Shenzhen University and has spent his career in telecommunications and the internet industry.

Fidji Simo is a technology executive who led Instacart and became OpenAI's chief executive of Applications in 2025; in July 2026 she stepped down for health reasons and moved into a part-time advisory role.

T. Rowe Price is a US asset management firm founded in 1937, reporting $1.86 trillion in assets under management and known for retirement and target-date investing. It was also a significant investor in Anthropic's $13 billion Series F round.

American politician born in San Francisco in 1967; founder of the PlumpJack Group, former mayor of San Francisco, and California's 40th governor, who has both signed and declined to sign frontier-AI legislation.

Chinese computer scientist and entrepreneur who built Sogou Search and the Sogou input method, led Sogou as CEO through its New York listing, and later founded the AI company Baichuan.

Su Hua is a Chinese technology entrepreneur who co-founded Kuaishou in 2011 and later stepped down as CEO, remaining involved in board leadership during the transition.

Cheng Yixiao is a Chinese entrepreneur who co-founded Kuaishou, served as its chief product officer, and has been its chief executive officer since 2021 and chairman since 2023.

An American robotics company founded in 1990 by three MIT researchers, iRobot built space and military robots before its Roomba vacuum cleaner made it a consumer name; it listed on NASDAQ in 2005 and filed for bankruptcy protection in 2025.

The AIBO Performer Kit (model ERF-510) is a motion editor released by Sony alongside its ERS-110 robot, letting owners write original movements for the robot on a personal computer and load them with an included Memory Stick.

A Chinese consumer electronics and smart manufacturing company built around smartphones, smart hardware and its AIoT platform, listed in Hong Kong in 2018 and extending its engineering into quadruped and humanoid robots.

Microsoft's commercial edition of its Kinect depth-sensing camera, released on 1 February 2012 at a suggested price of $249 with a version 1.0 software development kit, so that companies and researchers could build motion- and voice-based applications for Windows computers.

XPENG is a Chinese maker of smart electric vehicles founded in 2014 and headquartered in Guangzhou, which has extended its in-house AI work to humanoid robots, new driving models and robotaxi plans.

XiaoIce was a Microsoft chatbot released in May 2014 that users added to WeChat group chats for reminders, lookups, weather and jokes. It drew large crowds, then was banned by WeChat three days later for breaking platform rules.

Skype Translator is a Microsoft feature that automatically translates speech and instant-message conversations. A public preview opened on 15 December 2014 with Spanish and English speech translation and more than 40 messaging languages.[^1]

A handheld machine translation device from iFlytek, first released as Xiaoyi Translator in 2016, which the company's brand history describes as creating the AI translator product category.

Meena is a 2.6-billion-parameter open-domain chatbot from Google, trained end-to-end on filtered social media conversations. Its 2020 paper introduced the SSA human-evaluation metric and linked next-token perplexity to human-judged chat quality. The work was later renamed LaMDA.

Xiaomi CyberDog is a bionic quadruped robot that Xiaomi announced in August 2021. It was sold as an engineering exploration edition priced at 9,999 yuan and limited to 1,000 units, and was aimed at developers who wanted to program and extend it.

Character.AI is a chatbot company founded in 2021 by former Google engineers Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, known for user-created AI characters; it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in October 2026.

Midjourney V1 was Midjourney's first image-generation model, released in February 2022 and used through a bot on the company's Discord server. It produced abstract, painterly images and was replaced by V2 and V3 within months.

Inflection AI is an American AI company founded in 2022 by Reid Hoffman, Mustafa Suleyman and Karén Simonyan. It built the chatbot Pi and, in 2024, moved most of its staff and technology to Microsoft.

Midjourney V3, released on 25 July 2022, was the third model version of Midjourney; it raised image quality sharply by learning from how users behaved, and it produced the image that won a Colorado State Fair digital-art prize.

CyberOne, nicknamed Tieda, is a full-size humanoid bionic robot that Xiaomi presented in August 2022. It showed the company assembling perception, control and actuation into one machine, but it had not entered mass production.

Midjourney V4 is the fourth-generation image generation model released in alpha on 5 November 2022. It was the first Midjourney model trained on Google TPUs, and reviewers described it as a large step up from V3.

The consumer chat product of Zhipu AI, launched as ChatGLM in 2023 and later renamed GLM. It is the web entry point where new Zhipu models such as GLM-5.1 reach ordinary users.

SenseChat is SenseTime's conversational AI product, launched on 10 April 2023 as part of the SenseNova model family with more than 100 billion parameters, first offered to government and corporate clients and later expanded through the V4 and SenseNova V6 releases.

HuggingChat is a free chatbot launched by Hugging Face on 25 April 2023 as an open-source alternative to ChatGPT. It initially ran the volunteer Open Assistant model and let users switch among open models.

Pi is a chatbot launched by Inflection AI on 2 May 2023, named for "Personal Intelligence" and presented as a personal, conversational companion. Most of Inflection's staff, including two co-founders, moved to Microsoft in March 2024.

ERNIE 3.5 is a Baidu large language model announced in June 2023 as the upgrade behind the ERNIE Bot chatbot, adding a plugin architecture and, according to Baidu, outperforming ChatGPT on several benchmarked abilities.

Talkie is MiniMax's AI companion app for international markets, launched in June 2023; its Chinese counterpart, Xingye, followed in September 2023.

Stable Audio, launched by Stability AI on 13 September 2023, is a text-to-music and sound generator that Stability describes as its first audio product, later joined by open and enterprise versions.

Lyria is Google DeepMind's family of music-generation models, first announced in November 2023. It writes instrumental and vocal music from prompts, carries inaudible SynthID watermarks, and has reached users through YouTube Shorts, Vertex AI and the Gemini API.

Midjourney V6 is a version of Midjourney's image generation model, released in alpha on 21 December 2023 and trained from scratch over nine months; its 6.1 update followed in July 2024.

AutoGLM is a voice-driven smartphone agent from Zhipu (Z.ai), one of a family of agent and model releases that Zhipu has also published openly on Hugging Face.

Project Astra is a Google DeepMind research prototype of a universal AI assistant that watches and listens while it responds, shown at Google I/O in May 2024 and later rebuilt on Gemini 2.0.

Baichuan 4 is a closed large language model released by the Chinese company Baichuan on 22 May 2024, the company's first multimodal model and the engine behind its first AI assistant, Baixiaoying.

ERNIE 4.0 Turbo is a large language model Baidu released in June 2024 as a faster, cheaper upgrade to ERNIE 4.0, sitting between ERNIE 4.0 and ERNIE 4.5 in the company's model line.

Apple Foundation Models (AFM, 2024) are the first generation of the models behind Apple Intelligence: a roughly 3-billion-parameter on-device model and a larger server model that runs in Private Cloud Compute.

Dream Machine is Luma AI's text- and image-to-video generator, released to the public on 12 June 2024. It later became the home of Luma's Ray3 and Ray3.14 video models.

SmolLM is a family of small language models with 135M, 360M and 1.7B parameters, released openly by Hugging Face in July 2024 for on-device use and trained on a purpose-built corpus of generated textbooks, code and filtered web text.

NEO Beta is a bipedal humanoid prototype that 1X unveiled on 30 August 2024 for home use. The company presented it as a step from concept development toward limited in-home testing and production planning.

SmolLM2 is Hugging Face's second family of small language models, released in November 2024 at 135M, 360M and 1.7B parameters, with open weights and a data-centric training recipe.

A version of OpenAI's o1 that spends more compute before answering, launched on 5 December 2024 inside the $200-a-month ChatGPT Pro plan and added to the API on 19 March 2025.

A feature in the Gemini app that plans multi-step web research, gets the user's approval, browses for a few minutes and returns a report with links to its sources; later offered to developers as a managed agent in the Gemini API.

Project Mariner is a Google research prototype of a browser agent, announced with Gemini 2.0 in December 2024. Running as an experimental Chrome extension, it completes web tasks by understanding what is on the screen, and its computer-use capabilities later moved toward Google's developer APIs.

An open-weights 3-billion-parameter language model from Infinigence AI, released on Hugging Face in December 2024 under Apache-2.0, built on a Llama-2 architecture with a 32K-token context for local deployment.

Megrez-3B-Omni is an open-source model from December 2024 that understands images, text and audio on end-side devices, pairing a 2.29B-parameter language backbone with SigLip and Whisper encoders for about 4B parameters in total.

NEO Gamma is 1X's home humanoid robot, introduced in February 2025 with a learned whole-body controller that gives it a human-like gait; it was used for early household testing before the company's NEO robot succeeded it.

Phi-4-mini is a 3.8B-parameter text model and Phi-4-multimodal a 5.6B model that adds images and speech, both released by Microsoft in February 2025 as the small, efficiency-focused members of the Phi-4 family.

Qwen2.5-Omni is Alibaba's end-to-end multimodal model that takes text, images, audio and video as input and answers with text and natural speech. The 7B version was released on 26 March 2025.

Midjourney V7 is an image generation model released as an alpha to Midjourney's community on 4 April 2025, the first of the company's models to have personalization on by default and the first to add a cheap, fast Draft Mode.

Midjourney's first video model, released on 18 June 2025, turns an existing image into a short clip of about five seconds. It was presented as the company's first step toward real-time open-world simulation.

Gemma 3n is a mobile-first open model in Google's Gemma family, released in June 2025 in two sizes that run in roughly 2–3 GB of memory and natively accept image, audio, video and text input.

Comet is an AI web browser from Perplexity, launched on 9 July 2025 for Windows and macOS. Built on Chromium, it has an assistant that can carry out multistep browsing tasks.

Megrez2-3x7B-A3B is a mixture-of-experts language model from Infinigence AI built for on-device deployment, in which groups of adjacent layers share one pool of experts so that it stores 7.5 billion parameters but activates only 3 billion per token.

Claude in Chrome is a Chrome extension that lets Claude see web pages, click buttons and fill in forms for the user. Anthropic began a pilot on 25 August 2025 and opened the extension to more plans through late 2025.

Microsoft AI's first foundation model trained entirely in-house, announced on 28 August 2025. A mixture-of-experts text model, it opened for public testing on LMArena and was presented as one of several specialised models Microsoft intends to coordinate.

MAI-Voice-1 is Microsoft AI's speech generation model, announced in August 2025 as the first model in the MAI family and built to produce expressive, high-fidelity audio quickly.

Qwen3-Omni is an open-weight multimodal model released by the Qwen team in September 2025 under Apache 2.0, able to take in text, audio and video and to answer in text or speech across many languages.

Kimi OK Computer is the agent mode of Moonshot AI's Kimi assistant, released on 26 September 2025, which turns a prompt into multi-page websites, editable slide decks and other files. It followed Kimi-Researcher and marked Kimi's move into general-purpose agent products.

A 3-billion-parameter open reasoning model from AI21 Labs, released under the Apache 2.0 licence with a hybrid Transformer-Mamba design, a 256k-token context window and local execution on phones, Macs and PCs.

MAI-Image-1 is Microsoft's first image generation model developed entirely in-house, announced on 13 October 2025 and rolled out in Bing Image Creator and Copilot from 4 November 2025.

ChatGPT Atlas is a web browser built around ChatGPT, released by OpenAI for macOS on 21 October 2025. It offered an optional agent mode and browser memories, and was shut down on 9 August 2026.

Grok 4.1 is xAI's November 2025 update to Grok 4, aimed at emotional intelligence, creative writing and fewer hallucinations. Grok 4.1 Fast, a 2-million-token tool-calling model, followed on 19 November 2025.

Midjourney V8, released as an alpha on 17 March 2026, generates images about five times faster than earlier versions, adds a native 2K mode, and improves rendering of text inside images.

Claude Design is an Anthropic Labs product for making designs, prototypes, slides and one-pagers with Claude. It was announced on 17 April 2026 as a research preview and is powered by Claude Opus 4.7.

GPT Image 2 is OpenAI's image generation and editing model released on 21 April 2026, also presented as ChatGPT Images 2.0. It succeeded GPT Image 1 and was followed within months by the Sunburst and Flare model lines.

Gemini Spark is Google's personal AI agent inside the Gemini app, announced at Google I/O on 19 May 2026. It runs around the clock and carries out tasks on the user's behalf, moving from trusted testers to the macOS app and to more than 160 countries.

Apple Foundation Models 3 (AFM 3), published on 8 June 2026, is a family of five models: two on-device models, including a sparse 20B multimodal model, and three cloud models, one of which is optimised for NVIDIA GPUs.

Muse Image and Muse Video are Meta Superintelligence Labs' first media generation models, announced on 7 July 2026. Muse Image launched immediately, and Muse Video entered early preview.

GPT-Live-1 is OpenAI's full-duplex voice model family, launched 8 July 2026, which lets ChatGPT listen and speak at the same time and replaced the earlier chained speech pipeline in ChatGPT Voice.

Chinese AI researcher and entrepreneur who co-founded Moonshot AI in Beijing in 2023 and runs it as CEO; the company released the Kimi assistant and the open-weight Kimi K2 and K3 models.

Jesse Levinson is a co-founder and chief technology officer of Zoox, the autonomous ride-hailing company acquired by Amazon, where he continued to lead after the deal.

Uber's prototype self-driving Volvo XC90 struck and killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona, on 18 March 2018. The NTSB sharply criticised Uber and issued recommendations after finding that the vehicle's automatic braking was disabled.

The FCC is the US agency that administers the Communications Act of 1934. In 2024 it confirmed that restrictions on artificial or prerecorded voices already cover AI-generated voices, and proposed a US$6 million robocall penalty.

LM Studio is a closed-source desktop app for macOS, Windows and Linux that lets people download, run and chat with large language models entirely on their own computer, and serves them to other software through OpenAI-compatible local endpoints.

Mike Krieger, co-founder and CTO of Instagram, joined Anthropic as Chief Product Officer on 15 May 2024, taking charge of product engineering, product management and product design.

Blue Owl Capital is an alternative asset manager with $330 billion in assets under management, built from three separate businesses: Oak Street in real estate, Dyal Capital in stakes in other asset managers, and Owl Rock in private credit.

Bolt describes itself as Europe's first multi-modal mobility app, offering ride-hailing, car sharing, scooters and food and grocery delivery, with more than 200 million passengers and 4.5 million earning partners.

Yan Junjie is a co-founder and chief executive officer of the Chinese AI company MiniMax, which he led to a Hong Kong listing on 9 January 2026; he was previously an executive at SenseTime.

Zhang Yaqin is an electrical engineer and technology executive who spent nearly 16 years at Microsoft, served as president of Baidu from 2014 to 2019, and joined Tsinghua University in 2019 as a chair professor of intelligent science.

AI researcher and entrepreneur who held research positions at OpenAI, Google and DeepMind before co-founding the AI search company Perplexity in 2022, where he serves as CEO.

Poe is a platform where creators build and share AI-powered applications — from simple prompt bots to server bots, script bots, canvas apps and API bots — reaching millions of users, with per-call creator payouts and platform-covered inference costs.

The Recording Industry Association of America is the US trade body for companies that make and distribute recorded music. It lobbies, runs research, issues Gold and Platinum awards, and in 2024 sued two AI music generators.

NVIDIA's DGX Spark is a desktop-sized AI computer built on the GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip, pairing a 20-core Arm CPU with a Blackwell GPU and up to 128 GB of unified memory for running large models locally.

David Holz is the founder of Midjourney, a San Francisco independent research lab whose text-to-image tool became one of the best-known AI art generators. He earlier co-founded the hand-tracking hardware company Leap Motion.

Pika is a set of AI creative tools for video, image and audio, reached through a web app as well as an iOS app, a Model Context Protocol server and a ChatGPT app, and it lists its own models alongside third-party ones.

HeyGen is an AI video platform that turns a short recording of a person into a speaking avatar for social content, courses and business videos. Its Avatar V model is pitched at consistency across long clips and many languages.

Midjourney V2 was the second model version of Midjourney's image generation model, released on 12 April 2022 and the default model until V3 arrived that July. Midjourney later described it as colorful and painterly but low in coherency.

Yuewen is StepFun's AI assistant app, fully opened in March 2024, which reads text, data and charts in images and handles content creation, reasoning and analysis. In December 2024 its team absorbed the Maopaoya team, and the product was later renamed Step AI.

Wanzhi is a free bilingual AI productivity workspace released by 01.AI in May 2024 for the web and as a WeChat mini program; the name later extended to an enterprise large-model platform.

Baixiaoying is Baichuan's first AI assistant app, launched on 22 May 2024 and powered by its Baichuan 4 model. It is built around search, including multi-round search, and document reading, and Baichuan has framed it as a step towards an AI "super app".

Voxtral TTS is Mistral AI's first text-to-speech model, released in March 2026: about 4B parameters, nine languages, cloning from a three-second clip, open weights for non-commercial use and an API priced per character.