Poe’s latest usage report reveals significant shifts in AI model preferences, offering rare visibility into user behavior across major categories. The data, drawn from subscribers accessing over 100 AI models, shows OpenAI and Google strengthening their positions while Anthropic loses ground. Meanwhile, specialized reasoning capabilities have emerged as a crucial competitive battleground, with these models growing from 2% to 10% of text messages—signaling a new phase in AI development where analytical capabilities are becoming a key differentiator.
The big picture: Major shifts occurred in AI model usage between January and May 2025, with OpenAI and Google solidifying their dominant positions while specialized reasoning models gained significant traction.
- OpenAI maintained strong text generation leadership with GPT-4o holding 35.8% message share, while its GPT-4.1 family quickly captured 9.4% usage within weeks of release.
- Google made substantial gains in both reasoning and image generation, with Gemini 2.5 Pro capturing 5% of overall message share and 31% of reasoning model usage, while Imagen 3 tripled its image generation share to 30%.
Behind the numbers: Poe’s data reveals a competitive landscape characterized by rapid innovation and frequent model shifts, with the rate of new releases tripling compared to the same period in 2024.
- Reasoning capabilities have emerged as a key battleground, with specialized models growing from 2% to 10% of all text messages.
- OpenAI released multiple reasoning-focused models (o1-pro, o3-mini, o3-mini-high, o3, o4-mini) to compete with Google’s leadership in this category.
Market dynamics: While certain providers strengthened their positions, others experienced significant declines in user preference.
- Anthropic’s Claude models suffered a 10% absolute decline in text generation usage.
- Runway’s share of video generation plummeted from 60% to 20%, primarily losing ground to Kling (Kuaishou) and Google’s Veo 2.
Multimedia landscape: Specialized AI providers continue to dominate specific content generation categories despite increasing competition from tech giants.
- ElevenLabs maintains overwhelming dominance in audio generation with 80% of text-to-speech requests.
- Black Forest Labs’ FLUX models retained plurality share in image generation despite strong challenges from Google and OpenAI.
- Kling-2.0-Master from Kuaishou captured 21% of all video generation usage, helping the company reach 30% overall share in this category.
Why this matters: The rapidly shifting AI model preferences indicate businesses must maintain flexible, provider-agnostic evaluation frameworks rather than locking into single-vendor solutions.
- With reasoning capabilities emerging as a key differentiator, organizations that effectively leverage these specialized models may gain significant competitive advantages.
- The dominance of different providers across text, image, video, and audio generation suggests organizations need diverse procurement strategies to access best-in-class capabilities.
What they’re saying: “As a universal gateway to 100+ AI models, Poe has a unique view of usage trends across the ecosystem,” said Nick Huber, Poe’s AI Ecosystem Lead.
- “The most surprising things happening right now are rapid innovation, an increasingly diverse competitive landscape, and reasoning models are the clear success story of early 2025.”
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