Major AI market share shift revealed: DALL-E plummets 80% as Black Forest Labs dominates 2025 data

New data reveals dramatic AI market share shifts in 2025, with rapid changes in how businesses and consumers utilize artificial intelligence tools. Poe, a platform hosting over 100 AI models, released a comprehensive report today that provides an unprecedented look into real-world usage patterns across text, image, and video generation technologies.

Poe’s analysis, based on interactions from millions of users over the past year, offers technical decision-makers crucial insights into a competitive field where usage data is typically closely guarded. “As AI models continue to progress, we believe they will become central to how people acquire knowledge, tackle complex tasks, and manage everyday work,” the company states in its report.

The findings highlight significant market fragmentation across all AI modalities. While established players like OpenAI and Anthropic maintain dominant positions in text generation, newer entrants such as DeepSeek in text and Black Forest Labs in image generation have quickly captured meaningful market share, suggesting a dynamic ecosystem despite massive investments flowing toward industry leaders.

Here are the five most surprising takeaways from Poe’s analysis of the early 2025 AI ecosystem:

1. Google shows uneven performance across AI modalities

Google’s varied performance across different AI modalities reveals the challenges of achieving cross-modal leadership. Its Gemini family of text models “saw growing message share through October 2024,” but has been “declining since” despite substantial investment and technical capabilities.

This contrasts sharply with Google’s performance in other categories. In image generation, Google’s Imagen3 family has secured an impressive 30% market share, while in video generation, its Veo-2 model has rapidly captured 40% of messages.

This mixed performance suggests that technical excellence alone doesn’t guarantee market leadership. For enterprise decision-makers, this underscores the importance of evaluating AI capabilities on a modality-by-modality basis rather than assuming leadership in one area translates to excellence across all AI capabilities.

2. Video generation experiences high-velocity competition

Video generation, the newest frontier in generative AI, already witnesses intense competition and rapidly shifting leadership positions. According to the report, “The video generation category, while only existing starting in late 2024, has rapidly expanded to more than eight providers now offering diverse options to subscribers.”

Runway, an early pioneer, “has maintained a strong position with 30-50% of video gen messages” despite having only a single API model. However, Google’s entrance has immediately disrupted the status quo: “Google’s Veo-2, since its recent launch on Poe, rapidly captured nearly 40% of total video gen messages in just a few weeks.”

Chinese-developed models collectively account for approximately 15% of video generation messages. Models like “Kling-Pro-v1.5, Hailuo-AI, HunyuanVideo and Wan-2.1 continue to push the frontier on capabilities, inference time, and cost,” demonstrating that international competition remains a significant factor in driving innovation despite geopolitical tensions.

3. Image generation undergoes radical transformation

The image generation field demonstrates perhaps the most dramatic market shift in generative AI, with established players rapidly losing ground to newcomers. “First-mover image gen models like DALL-E-3 and various StableDiffusion versions were pioneers in the space, but have seen their relative usage share drop nearly 80% as the number of official image gen models has grown from 3 to ~25,” the report states.

Black Forest Labs emerged as the surprise leader: “Black Forest Labs’s FLUX family of image generation models burst onto the scene in mid 2024 and has maintained its dominant position as the clear frontrunner since, capturing close to 40% of messages.” This represents a remarkable achievement for a relative newcomer against established competitors with vast resources.

Google’s strategic investment in image generation is also bearing fruit, with “Google’s Imagen3 family has been on a steady growth since its late 2024 launch, carving out almost 30% usage share.” This positions Google as a strong second-place contender despite its later market entry.

Poe’s data reveals a concerning trend for AI companies investing heavily in maintaining older models: “as frontier labs release more capable models, usage of the new flagship model in a provider’s offering quickly cannibalizes the older versions.”

This pattern manifests across companies, with users rapidly abandoning GPT-4 for GPT-4o and Claude-3 for Claude 3.5. The implication is clear: maintaining backward compatibility and support for legacy models may have diminishing returns as users consistently migrate to the newest offerings.

Companies may need to reconsider their product lifecycle strategies, potentially focusing resources on fewer models with more frequent updates rather than maintaining extensive families of offerings with varying capabilities and price points.

5. Text AI duopoly faces new challengers

OpenAI and Anthropic maintain dominance in text generation but face increasing pressure from newer entrants. According to Poe’s data, “text usage across OpenAI and Anthropic models has been nearly equal, showcasing growing competition in the highly expressive text modality” since Claude 3.5 Sonnet’s launch in June 2024. Together, these two companies command approximately 85% of text interactions on the platform.

Anthropic’s rapid ascension to parity with OpenAI suggests that quality and capability improvements can quickly translate to market share shifts, even in a field with strong network effects and first-mover advantages.

More intriguing is DeepSeek’s emergence as a legitimate third contender. The report notes that “DeepSeek-R1 and -V3 went from no usage in December 2024 to gain 7% of messages at their peak, a significantly higher level than any previous open-source model family, such as Llama & Mistral.” This dramatic rise indicates that barriers to entry for new text AI providers may be lower than previously anticipated.

The road ahead: a fluid landscape for AI decision-makers

The Poe report illuminates a generative AI market characterized by rapid evolution, where technical excellence alone doesn’t guarantee sustained market leadership. Enterprise decision-makers face an increasingly complex vendor landscape, where today’s dominant player might be tomorrow’s also-ran.

What remains clear is that user preferences can shift dramatically with new model releases, suggesting organizations should build flexible AI stacks that can adapt to changing capabilities rather than locking into single-vendor solutions. The multimodal nature of AI adoption—with different leaders emerging across text, image, and video—further complicates enterprise strategy.

As Poe notes in its conclusion, “We hope these findings offer a glimpse into the shifting dynamics of the AI model landscape.” For businesses navigating this fluid ecosystem, the message is unmistakable: the AI revolution continues at breakneck speed, rewarding those who maintain flexibility while punishing those who bet too heavily on yesterday’s technology leaders.

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