Killer LLM apps
ChatGPT was released in October 2022 and has become the most successful consumer product since the iPhone. Since then, we’ve been asking: what are the other LLM-powered killer apps? Cursor and Replit appear to be winners within coding, though it’s taken two years for these to emerge amongst use cases rooted in text.
LLMs enable more than just text generation, though. They also power image, audio, and video generation and understanding. This continues to be such a fundamental breakthrough that it’s hard to think of something that won’t be changed by it.
One way to think about this is killer apps are not what you can build with LLMs, but rather what you can do with LLMs. A chatbot allows you to converse with an LLM. A coding tool allows you to build with it. A note-taking tool allows you to be more organized. A research tool allows you to better understand latest advancements.
Another way to think about killer apps is to think product-level. What are the products that become inevitable because of a technological breakthrough? Uber is an example of a product that became inevitable because of mobile computing.
Most startups I see getting built today are enterprise, and tons of venture capital funding is funneling to them. “Vertical AI Agents” are the craze and rightfully so. Many incumbent enterprise companies are at risk of being disrupted because LLMs are a foundational tool in the toolkit that directly impacts user experience.
Cal AI is an example of an inevitable product. If multimodal LLMs can interpret images, of course I will use them to stay track of how healthy my food is. Voice and video generation advancements will support the launch of more killer apps. Language translation is another obvious use case.
I expect more consumer LLM-powered companies to emerge in 2025, delivering new killer apps to the market.
It's going to be a wild year, y’all.
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