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Poe‘s latest usage report shows OpenAI and Google strengthening their positions in key AI categories while Anthropic loses ground and specialized reasoning capabilities emerge as a crucial competitive battleground.
According to data released today by Poe, a platform offering access to more than 100 AI models, significant market share shifts occurred across all major AI categories between January and May 2025. The data, drawn from Poe subscribers, provides rare visibility into actual user preferences beyond industry benchmarks.
“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, in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat. “The most surprising things happening right now are rapid innovation (3x the number of releases Jan-May 2025 vs. the same period in 2024), an increasingly diverse competitive landscape, and reasoning models are the clear success story of early 2025.”
A chart from Poe showing AI model rankings across different categories as of May 2025. OpenAI’s GPT-4o dominates in text generation with 35.8% usage share, while Google’s Gemini-2.5-Pro leads in reasoning capabilities and Imagen3 in image generation. (Credit: Poe)
GPT-4o maintains dominance while new models quickly capture market share
In core text generation, OpenAI’s GPT-4o maintained its commanding position with 35.8% of message share, while the company’s newer GPT-4.1 family quickly captured 9.4% of usage within weeks of launch. Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro similarly achieved approximately 5% message share shortly after its introduction.
These gains came largely at the expense of Anthropic’s Claude models, which saw a 10% absolute decline in share during the reporting period. The report notes that Claude 3.7 Sonnet has now substantially replaced the earlier Claude 3.5 Sonnet in user preference, though the latter still maintains a notable 12% usage share.
DeepSeek, which experienced viral growth earlier this year, has seen its momentum slow as competitors have released their own affordable, verbose reasoning models. DeepSeek R1‘s message share declined from a peak of 7% in mid-February to 3% by the end of April.
Complex problem-solving capabilities become key differentiator in AI market
Perhaps the most significant trend identified in the report is the dramatic growth in specialized reasoning models, which have expanded from approximately 2% to 10% of all text messages sent on Poe since the beginning of 2025.
“Reasoning models, even in the early days, have demonstrated a remarkable ability to handle complex tasks with increased precision,” Huber told VentureBeat. “Early adopters are clearly finding value in this and are willing to take on the tradeoffs in cost and processing time for better outcomes.”
In this high-growth segment, Gemini 2.5 Pro has quickly established itself as a leader, capturing approximately 31% of reasoning model usage within just six weeks of launch. It now leads the category, ahead of Claude’s reasoning-specialized models.
OpenAI continues to innovate rapidly in this space, releasing multiple reasoning models (o1-pro, o3-mini, o3-mini-high, o3, and o4-mini) in the first four months of 2025 alone. The report indicates that Poe users quickly adopt OpenAI’s newest offerings, transitioning from older models like o1 to newer alternatives like o3.
The report also noted the emergence of hybrid reasoning models, such as Gemini 2.5 Flash Preview and Qwen 3, which can dynamically adjust their reasoning level within conversations. However, these models currently represent only about 1% of reasoning model usage.
Industry analysts suggest this shift toward specialized re …