The most popular AI tools of 2024 (and what that even means) [Video]

Popularity in the tech world is hard to measure. I’ve talked at length about this in my discussions of programming language popularity. It really comes down to what you use to measure popularity — and how available those metrics are to those doing the analysis.

When it comes to AI, that’s even more of a challenge because AI can be a stand-alone tool or can be embedded deeply in other products. For example, the generative fill tool in Photoshop is very popular (and I quickly found it to be indispensable), but it won’t show up in any public AI tool metrics.

Also: I’m an AI tools expert, and these are the only two I pay for

Exploding Topics is a company that analyzes trends based on web searches, conversations and mentions. It recently took on the challenge of determining AI tool popularity. Its approach was to collect data from two reliable web analytics platforms, Semrush and Similarweb, and calculate …